Solos and Chorus

I note that today has been declared International Dawn Chorus Day or so I hear from an item on BBC News. The Wildlife Trusts appear to have initiated this idea and have roped in the BBC as partners. As I can’t see any reference to it on RSPB’s website I’m assuming they are not involved. That’s an interesting sidelight on rivalry within the conservation industry each charity competing for members and always anxious to keep its organisation in the news. The RSPB has its own pet projects such as the annual bird count in January. It is in fact the most important part of the role of any worker within these charities to keep their organisations in the public eye.


On Blacka Moor Sheffield Wildlife Trust organised a dawn chorus walk on Saturday from 5.30 am to 7.30 am. This has become an annual event and they publicise it well, restricting the numbers to 15 and saying that they are usually oversubscribed. In a way not surprising because many people love to try to think they're connecting with a natural world and there is something marvellously appealing about the combination of life force and musicality in this amazing phenomenon. The blackbird who sings from my roof every morning from 5 am might be thought to give the neighbourhood enough of a wake-up, but we shouldn’t complain. His singing is wonderful. Many would pay for the experience. A bit like living next to Pavarotti limbering up for a matinee performance.

The Dawn Chorus surely means, though, a rousing display of diverse voices competing for attention, not just a solo performance. And that’s what I have heard in the best parts of Blacka where most songbirds are to be found. Again for me it’s not about identification but about the blend (and sometimes dissonant clash) of individual voices straining to be heard. At its best it is orchestral with the smaller higher voices heard against the deeper calling of the larger birds and the middle range often providing the most imaginative singing. The perfection that I’ve often heard in Blacka’s secret valley has consisted of many willow warblers and chiff chaffs alongside resident robins, dunnocks and wrens; at another level are the garden warblers and blackcaps and then the blackbirds and thrushes in quite a different style; as a backing group for this there should be a cuckoo and a crow giving the equivalent of the percussion section. Anyone who has heard all of this more or less simultaneously on an otherwise silent (no human activity) morning in an unspoiled part of the landscape in that special acoustic associated with trees will never doubt the value of having places where minimal intervention is the prime rule of management. It is in the best sense restorative. Nobody could fail to benefit from it but, sadly, not enough people get to experience it. It is as good as (better than) anything presented on BBC wildlife programmes. Better because experienced at first hand and without those infuriating self publicising presenters.

So how did the SWT Dawn Chorus go? I went along with them one year but simply saw them from a distance yesterday. I don’t know how the customers found it. Certainly some looked very cold, not surprisingly, and one or two rather disengaged but it was very early in the morning and probably some had been persuaded along by partners or parents. The poster advertising the event invited people to ‘experience the clamouring commotion of the dawn chorus as Blacka Moor wakes up’. Hmm. Well it’s hype and spin that SWT try to specialise in so no surprises.

But I can’t think that’s what the SWT party experienced yesterday. It’s not just that the morning came after one of the coldest May nights for years.There are places on Blacka where you can, if moderately lucky, on the right morning get the kind of magic that I’ve tried to describe above. But that’s not on the route the SWT group took. The purpose of the walk for the leader may have been somewhat different to that of the writer of the poster blurb. For him it’s important when you’ve got a group of people with you to put across the propaganda for heathland management (aka cowpat management). Hence the listening out for the isolated calls of a comparatively restricted range of species who tend to be solo performers. The woods near the car park where they started may have yielded a song thrush and even a warbler or two and when they waited near my bird feeding station they might have been accosted by the odd chaffinch. And the trip through along the main track could have allowed the party to enjoy a skylark’s wonderful individual effort. There is a fine area that’s been untouched by managers for many years to the west of the track and that’s ideal for larks.

But as for a genuine experience of what most people understand as a Dawn Chorus you would need to have been in the secondary woodland of birch and rowan, the secret valley of the hinds which at its best can deliver the ‘clamouring commotion’. But then that’s not on the propaganda schedule that apologists for more management and farm livestock grazing are instructed to keep to. They need to show that the best of nature comes only from human intervention.

Well there’s a surprise.