Cornflake concerto is still the best home entertainment

HOME ENTERTAINMENT is helping to keep us of sound mind through these strange days of not going out.

Online, this has ranged from the Rolling Stones presenting one of their best-known songs, with band members in four separate locations, to the mezzosoprano singer Katherine Jenkins performing We’ll Meet Again to an empty Royal Albert Hall whilst being streamed to thousands of people watching on YouTube.

But there is another stunning concert providing home entertainment in our gardens every morning – the dawn chorus.

I like to call it the cornflake concerto, and May is the best month to hear this daily recital by our local birdlife.

The different instruments are fairly easy to identify. The blackbird’s flute is often followed by the reedy piccolos of robins and dunnocks and the repetitive clarinet lines of a song thrush.

Of course, it is entirely feasible to lie in bed and listen to the dawn chorus, but the experience is infinitely more enjoyable if you set your alarm for around 4am, as I do, and go outside.

The more trees and bushes, fence posts and gable ends there are around you, the more musical the experience will be because many of the dawn choristers like to choose a prominent perch from which to greet the day by declaring their breeding territories.

Dress code for the cornflake concerto is optional, but with temperatures having plummeted since the weekend I would suggest you wrap up warm and perhaps take a hot drink in a flask since more than a little bit of standing around is involved.

My dawn chorus foray took me down to an old mill pond, through a stretch of wooded valley and onto the fringe of Rombalds Moor.

It is something I have done most years for a couple of decades, and the top five running order of singing birds was comfortingly familiar: blackbird – always the first bird to sing – followed by a robin, dunnock, great tit and willow warbler.

My route added some unusual instruments to the mix, ones I would never hear back in my garden.

For instance, there was a sudden bass note from a cock pheasant, while a coot’s explosive “kri-pp” reverberated through the chill morning air. And to my delight, when I reached the turning point of the walk on the edge of Baildon Moor I was treated to the lofty twittering of a skylark.

I loved that the volume of chorus seemed to increase more or less in sync with the growing light.

But when the music finally began to subside, as if someone was slowly turning down the volume, the morning suddenly seemed less exciting. The birds had given up singing to go in search of breakfast.

Street lighting has created a false dawn for some species, however, and studies at Sheffield University some years ago found that robins in urban areas were singing through the night. If other birds do the same perhaps people in towns and cities might go out to the hear the midnight chorus.