Singing With Nightingales: Dawn Chorus

Dawn Chorus Day

Join The Nest Collective online from 11pm on 1st May for a spoken-word journey, hosted by Sam Lee, through some of the finest poems and writings celebrating the nightingale, the wonder of birds and the natural world.

This long-form broadcast will then drift into pure nightingale song through the night and, as the birds rise, will culminate in the dawn chorus itself, finishing at 6am on Sunday 2nd May.

Invite your friends to watch with you! Join the Facebook event here.

Guest speakers

We are delighted to announce the contributors for this broadcast include:

Caitlin Moran • Robert Macfarlane • Satish Kumar • John Lewis-Stempel • Jackie Morris • Rob Da Bank • Anita Sethi • Melissa Harrison • Mark Avery • Merlin Sheldrake • David Lindo • David Rothenberg • Zena Edwards • Patrick Barkham • Matthew Bannister • Farhana Yamin • Mac Macartney • Mary Colwell • Verity Sharp • Genevieve Tudor • Jay Griffiths

International Dawn Chorus Day is the worldwide celebration of nature’s greatest symphony. All across the world people rise early to enjoy the sound of birdsong, ‘from rattling wrens in Rotherham to crooning cowbirds in the Caribbean’.

Each year, for a short period mid-April, a few thousand nightingales fly to southern UK from Africa. They can be heard in just a small number of special locations, taking up songful residence after dusk. The territorial males serenade loyally each night for no more than six weeks among the blackthorn and forest margins, giving unbelievable privilege to those who know where to go.

In this modern age, with biodiversity in decline and habitats being eroded, the nightingale has become representative of all that we have to lose. It is a small, brown, unremarkable-looking bird, but it possesses one of nature’s finest singing voices. The bird winters in Africa but spends April to July mating and nesting in Europe and the Middle East. The numbers visiting England have declined so sharply that it is now on the UK’s Red List of species at the greatest conservation risk.

In Spring 2020, with the sudden lockdown and restrictions in place across the UK, we had to work hard to reimagine our Singing With Nightingales concert series for extraordinary times. After some serious technical exploration and re-devising, we launched our ‘from the forest’ digital versions of Singing with Nightingales. These online events had Sam Lee, deep in the Sussex woods, beaming live nightingale song to our special guest collaborators, with the whole sonic duet broadcast live on Youtube. You can find the 2020 series on our Youtube channel.

This Dawn Chorus Day event, and our Earth Day and Homecoming events before it, are the next chapters in our online programme, inviting audiences across the world to hear the unforgettable sounds of the nightingale.

Whether you’re in California or Coventry, Moscow or Middlesborough, we invite you to Sussex for the evening to enjoy one of nature’s most captivating arias.

If you are in a financial position to do so, we would like to ask if you would consider making a donation to the Nest Collective to support this broadcast and the Singing with Nightingales series. This will help to ensure that we can run Singing with Nightingales and our annual season in future years, and offer support for our family of musicians and amazing team of artists and art makers who help to deliver these exceptional evenings. We are hugely grateful for any donations made, large or small.

Performing Artists