Almost 40 years since The Birdie Song haunted the charts – and every children’s birthday party for a long time afterwards – the wildlife charity RSPB is releasing a single that, while far from novelty, may just match the Tweets’ infuriating oompah hit for sheer oddness.
Let Nature Sing is all chorus – and not in the same way as Blur’s Song 2, say, is all chorus. This is two and a half minutes of pure birdsong, featuring 25 of the UK’s best loved or most threatened birds among its guest vocalists, including the common blackbird and robin and the endangered nightingale and bittern.
The aim of the single, says Nic Scothern, the south-east regional director of the RSPB, is to celebrate all things winged and highlight the crisis of extinction facing the natural world.
“Since 1966, we have lost more than 44m birds in the UK alone,” she says. “The UK is one of the world’s most nature-deprived countries, which is truly shocking. We know that culture can inspire action, so, by using that, together with the power of humans’ inherent connection to nature, we can achieve something remarkable.”
The resulting track – put together by Bill Barclay, the music director at Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Mercury-prize-nominated folk artist Sam Lee – is strangely comforting and a welcome sound for anyone who has ever enjoyed a dawn chorus. In a study of 2,000 people by YouGov, 54% chose birdsong as the sound they would most like to wake up to, while 82% of respondents said birdsong made them feel positive.
The single becomes more affecting with each listen, as the penny drops that, if the catastrophic decline in UK birdlife were to continue, it could serve as a document to remind us what birdsong sounded like. When paired with stories about property developers covering hedgerows with netting to stop birds nesting before planning applications, it paints a bleak picture of our regard for wildlife. Similarly, the track highlights just how few bird calls the average listener recognises (I reckon I can identify four: cuckoo, collared dove, blackbird and robin).
Adrian Thomas, the RSPB’s birdsong expert, who recorded each of the birds on the track between 2016 and January this year, says we have lost our connection to nature. “Go back maybe 100 years and people would have recognised almost all of these birds,” he says. “They would have been in tune with the landscape and they would have read all the changes in the seasons. I’d love to get to the point where we recognised those things again.”
Thomas began recording birdsong as a young boy on the small Worcestershire nature reserve cared for by his dad. “There were nightingales there, so we would go out at night to hear them, along with scores of people from across the county who would travel to listen to them,” he says. “The problem now is that nightingales have had a 90% decline in the UK over the past 50 years, so finding them is very hard. Human noise pollution is also a problem – it means crawling out of my tent at 3.30am to make sure no one else is around so I can get a clean recording.”
Lee has been exploring the links between art and nature for some time. A bird-lover, he regularly performs in rural settings, taking fans into nature to experience “the power of the outdoors”. On Monday, he will perform in central London as part of an Extinction Rebellion event, broadcasting nightingale song around Berkeley Square, as well as Let Nature Sing.
“What we’ve created is a two and a half minute conversation between species that don’t ever meet and a sort of anthropomorphic, dreamlike journey through Britain, across different landscape, from wetland to moorland to forest to scrub,” he says. “We’re hearing the birds at their most prolific, ceremonial and romantic.
“The editing took care of itself. The birds all knew where they needed to be. All Bill and I did was give a bit of guidance, which is perfect when you think about it. We weren’t controlling nature, but observing it and helping it along.”
For more information about the campaign, go to rspb.org.uk
