Thursday 22nd April 2021 • 11pm to 1am • Live on Youtube

Celebrate Earth Day 2021 with this special late-night live broadcast of Singing With Nightingales.

Special guests include:

Bill Laurance (Snarky Puppy) • Kate Stables (This Is The Kit) • Karine Polwart • Ayanna Witter-Johnson • Martin Green (Lau) • Aidan O’Rourke (Lau) • Laura Cannell • Eliza Shaddad • Maddie Cutter • Jenny Sturgeon • Jay Chakravorty • Arthur Jeffes (Penguin Cafe) • Avawaves • AJIMAL • You Are Wolf • Ben See • Faró • Nicki Wells • Ellie Wilson

Earth Day is an annual event celebrated in 193 countries around the world on 22nd April to demonstrate support for environmental protection. Please support the movement in whatever way you can.

If you are in a financial position to do so, we would also 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.

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. For Earth Day this year, folk singer and Nest Collective Artistic Director, Sam Lee, will be live broadcasting the nightingale’s song from one of their reliable Sussex habitats – one of the few areas in the UK which has seen a slight increase in their numbers in recent years. Click here for more information on the nightingale, its conservation, and our Singing With Nightingales series.

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 Earth Day event, our Homecoming event a week before it, and our Dawn Chorus event on 1st May, are the next chapters in our online programme, inviting audiences across the world to hear the unforgettable sounds of the nightingale.

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