I was coming down off the moorland tops and the curved outlines of the near slopes were already immersed in darkness. Suddenly out of a featureless middle distance came the unexpected song of a stonechat.
It is not a well-known vocalisation, although the species itself has expanded both here and in lowland England. Stonechats (Saxicola rubicola) love open country – coastal dunes, heath or gorse-sprinkled places – where the males are familiar to many.
She may be brown and inconspicuous, but his head is coal-black encircled with a linen-white half-collar and across the upper bib is the most delightful evening orange. In truth, even he has a nervous, fidgety manner, as if faintly embarrassed by so much conspicuous colour. The song is comparably unassuming and rather frail – a brief scatter of bright glasslike notes that seldom carry far – but this night it sounded much clearer.
We often overlook how much diurnal birds will vocalise in darkness. Curlews and skylarks routinely fly and sing after sunset. Sedge and reed warblers will keep up the crazy free-form bebop rhythm of their mimicry-laced songs at night and it was once well known how corncrakes could sustain a single-sound file-rasping crex note on and on even until dawn.
Snipe will deliver an airborne sound, known as drumming, in which they fly repeatedly down to drive air through outer pinnate tail feathers, to produce a weird vibratory juddering effect that, in the absence of visual cues, is felt as much as heard. And perhaps most beautiful of all, if we ignore the dark’s most famous songster, is the odd night-owl blackbird who can roll out a strangely disembodied version of his customary hymn to late-morning.
I cherish these various kinds of after-hours avian music, and even more for their context. But this was the first time that I had ever heard a stonechat sing at night. Standing there, faced towards the western sky with a gibbous moon in its ice-blue lower third and the faintest lemon band of light still lying at the Earth’s rim, I found this cock stonechat pouring out his tiny heart somewhere on that blank moor perhaps the most moving moment of all.
