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open-top Morris Minor. For hours over several
nights we would drive along, stop the car and listen for
distant singing birds. In all those miles we heard 25
separate males which seemed like a magnificent total.
In day 1979 I counted at least 16 singing nightingales
at Fingringhoe Wick within 20 minutes. There were even
more - a total of about 26 according to Laurie Forsyth -
but Fingringhoe placed our previous count in perspective.
Hore recently, the RSPB has reported 40 at Minsmere!
The energy of 1976 had many spin-offs. For a start we
heard, and had expected to hear, tawny owls and nightjars.
Less expected were the robins, dunnocks, wrens, sedge warblers
and grasshopper warblers which also contributed to the night
song. In fact, listening by night is probably the most
reliable, and certainly the simplest method, to survey
an area for grasshopper warblers. And we learnt a great
deal about nightingales themselves, particularly since
we were inspired to carry our survey to subsequent years.
We readily confirmed that nightingales sang best by night
and during the dawn chorus, starting at about 10.30 p.m.
and ending as the sun rose. Only rarely did they sing
immediately before and after dusk, but they often sang
extremely well by day. Winds quietened them but the cold,
to within 1 or 2 C of freezing, did not. The song period
was usually short, often as short as ten days, and fell
between the date of the earliest arrival (3rd or 4th week
of April, usually by the 24th) and the second week of 3une.
And even after falling silent at the end of its song period,
an individual can usually be encouraged to at least snatch
a reply to a tape-recorded bird.
Perhaps the most exciting visits were by day to areas where
we had shown Nightingales to be present from surveys on
previous nights. Spring always presents a challenging
tangle of bird song and there is the hope that as each
note and phrase is interpreted some new and perhaps rare
bird will give itself away. These day visits emphasized
some important aspects of habitat. Until early Way there
is little foliage to veil the thickets that nightingales
seem to prefer and it is those weeks early in the season
which offer the greatest opportunities to see the bird.
Unlucky Britain that the nightingale should be so shy and