The spectacular dawn chorus of Kingley Vale
Afriend told me yesterday that the problem with feeding birds in your garden is that you have to listen to them singing like demented popstars all day. Screaming song thrushes, tittering titmice, yodelling green woodpeckers and howling pigeons seem to be disturbing him dreadfully. Well, he should be so lucky. Wait until you lose your hearing as I have, top notes anyway. Blue tits and goldcrests went first but I’m still okay with crows, ravens, owls, and woodpeckers drumming. Thankfully I kept that inner ear trumpet intact for 50 years while I recorded every single bird singing in every spring and summer chorus within the 190 acres of Kingley Vale yew forest near Chichester. I made similar records for West Dean Woods around my home from 1975 onwards.
By plotting every songster of all the 50 breeding species on large scale maps I was able to show exactly what each separate territory was. I now have some fascinating records of population swings to show for it and to put into a new book on Kingley Vale which shows what has happened there for half a century with its birds, butterflies and orchids.
I have some spectacular memories of the dawn chorus. It is hard to believe now but in 1968 eight nightingales were fighting each other for four acres of space along the valley path. I led a group of 20 early risers from the Chichester NHS that year at 3.45am to hear them. Throbbing melodies entranced everyone as we forgot how cold we were standing still to listen. The number of nightingales was judged the highest index in Britain.
By 1984 nightingales had vanished from Kingley Vale and many other woodlands, pushed out by the massive explosion of fallow deer which denuded the understorey of bush species across the country and destroyed the bird’s ecosystem.
However, robins, which are closely related to nightingales, are not in the least affected by deer, having a completely different breeding habitat. They shot up from 21 pairs in 1975 to 80 in 1981 and made a decent 61 in 2003 as well.
Blackbird numbers, steady at about 28 pairs for years and years, suddenly peaked in 2002 at 46 pairs. The five species of the
titmouse family more or less remained constant throughout the 50 years although, blue, cole, and great all peaked in 1972 with 16 pairs each. Only the great tit peaked again in 2000 with a similar 16. Turtle doves almost vanished.
Many species became extinct in the reserve, in keeping with national declines. These included cuckoo, lapwing, woodcock, barn owl, little owl, nightjar, grasshopper warbler, garden warbler, spotted flycatcher, yellowhammer and shelduck. Yes, those big black and white ducks which were once so common in Chichester Harbour had an overspill into the Downs as the birds searched for rabbit burrows in which to breed. All those burrows around the harbour were already filled up.
Another bird which vanished was the golden pheasant. A colony of these brilliant gold, red, dark blue and speckled brown birds had escaped from Edward James aviaries at Monkton House and eventually found sanctuary in dense gorse bushes on Bow Hill. The only colony now recorded is in Thetford Chase, no doubt escapees from some other grand estate.
Dawn choruses were the time to record the presence of birds and in this I had acquired some practice as a youth listening to symphonic music in which 12 different instruments could be playing their own separate tunes and could with practice be followed. Though later on in life this became easier by reading the score at the same time. What I have done over 50 years is to make notations on paper of the bird symphonies being played in the trees. This idea might perhaps help my friend with his noise problem as he calls it. I think he is probably just a philistine though.