Listen to Britain’s dawn chorus of 1976: the dramatic loss of birdsong in 50 years
Guardian recreates audio landscape of past filled by loud morning symphony before 73m wild birds were lost
Imagine a deafening abundance of birdsong so loud it wakes your children at dawn; the chirrup of house sparrows, the chattering of starlings, the melody of the wren, and the clear high-pitched flute of blackbirds saturating the garden, reverberating around your local park, dominating your neighbourhood from early morning to evening twilight.
So loud is the song of the thrush that the naturalist and ornithologist WH Hudson wrote in 1919 that he was grateful when observing one that it was perched on a tree at a distance from his home, “so that when I woke at half past three or four o’clock, the shrill indefatigable voice came in at the open window, softened by distance and washed by the dewy atmosphere to greater purity”.
Poet Percy Shelley wrote of the skylark’s shrill delight, while John Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale was inspired when he heard the full voice of the bird in his garden. In 1832, the poet John Clare attempted to put the nightingale’s song into words for the first time.
“Chee chew chew chew” and higher still
“Cheer cheer cheer cheer” more loud and shrill
“Cheer up cheer up cheer-up” and dropt
Low “tweet tweet tweet jug jug jug” and stopt.
It was the poet Mary Oliver who remarked how pausing to observe nature closely is the first step to protecting and conserving it. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” she wrote.
But despite the obvious devotion of the most renowned literary voices of the last two centuries, the “chee chew chee chew” of the nightingale, the twittering of the house martin and the voice of the song thrush are heard no more in gardens, yards and balconies across many parts of Britain.
In the last 50 years, Britain has lost an astonishing 73 million wild birds from its landscape, according to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO).
“What we have is a shifting baseline,” said Dr Rob Robinson, a senior scientist at the BTO who researches wild bird populations. “People engaging in nature today are going to think the numbers they are seeing are normal, particularly children. But if you go back 50 years, they would have been able to experience a much richer environment.”
As the symphony of birdsong known as the dawn chorus draws to its annual close at the end of June, the Guardian has recreated an audio landscape from across the past 50 years to try to portray the variety and plentitude of birdsong we have lost since tens of millions more birds were in full voice. The calls and songs of a variety of species have been isolated to build an illustration of the dawn chorus, representing a year in each decade, from now back to the abundance of the 1970s.
In April 1976, as the dawn chorus was in full swing, Labour’s Harold Wilson resigned as prime minister and James Callaghan took his place. Today, while remarkably similar political manoeuvrings are taking place, the soundscape of the natural world is utterly changed to one of absences, omissions and loss.
This “shifting baseline syndrome” – a gradual shifting of the accepted norm when it comes to the natural environment – is, said nature writer Robert Macfarlane, an “enormously powerful and I think very pernicious, psychological mechanism whereby each new generation measures loss from the degraded baseline that it grew up into. We’re part of a web. We’re wired into the wild world. Birds help us remember that, and they can do it in a very everyday way.”
Ralph Pite, a professor of English at the University of Bristol who specialises in using literature to explore the biodiversity and climate emergency, was 14 in the spring and summer of 1976. “I grew up in Worcester and went to school [there],” he said. “I remember kids at school at this time of year back then saying they had been woken up by the dawn chorus. All those kids were both excited and enthralled because of it. But today that vividness has really gone.”
Human intervention in the form of housing and commercial building developments have dramatically reduced habitats for wild birds in Britain, a country that has become one of the most nature depleted in the world. The industrialisation of agriculture, the repeated growing of monocultures such as cereal crops, pesticides, pollution and climate change are all decimating our wild bird population, and in some cases driving long-loved and well-known species towards extinction.
The chattering starling and the chirruping house sparrow, so plentiful in 1976 that they were considered by some a pest, have seen dramatic losses in British gardens. The house sparrow population has declined by more than 72% since then, and the starling population by 88%, according to the BTO.
Both species are today on the red list of UK birds of conservation concern, as are the greenfinch, swift, house martin, tree sparrow, cuckoo and nightingale.
Robinson said the loss was more nuanced than the headline figure might suggest. “Dramatic losses took place in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s, and since then the decline has been at a lower level losses but consistent,” he said.
“We are seeing specialist species decline, in some cases badly, for example the lesser spotted woodpecker, the red-backed shrike – which were common across southern England – have disappeared now. At the same time, more generalised species like the wood pigeon are doing much better. So what we are seeing is a huge loss in abundance.”
Abundant species of birds are an indicator of the state of wildlife. A wide range of habitats is required to support different bird species, so their loss is a sign of the decline of those rich and varied environments.
Susan Morgan, the chief executive of SongBird Survival, said birdsong was also much more than a sign of a thriving environment. “We cannot allow the places we live, work, and walk to fall silent,” she said. “Birdsong … is our everyday connection to the natural world. A quieter dawn chorus tells us something is going wrong, often before we even recognise it. Once lost we may not get it back.”
New threats are emerging to birds that have not been at high risk of population declines until now. In south-east England and Greater London, the blackbird is under threat from the Usutu virus, which originated in Africa and was first seen in Britain in 2020. Its geographical spread is attributed to climate change.
Garden bird trichomonosis, caused by a parasite, is affecting greenfinches and is starting to spread to chaffinches. Bird charities including the RSPB are pleading with well-intentioned bird lovers not to feed birds from May to October, when natural food is abundant, in an attempt to help reduce the spread of diseases, because garden feeders can be super-spreaders.
Colin Butler, a director in the civil engineering industry, said he had noticed the decline in varieties of species in his garden in Wallsend. “There’s far less starlings and house sparrows than when I was young,” he said, adding that the sound of the dawn chorus used to lighten his mood. “I associate morning birdsong with peace and an anything-is-possible mindset.”
Pite and others, however, retain some optimism and highlight the popularity of the Merlin app as a sign that people are paying attention to nature and, with that connection, helping to record and potentially conserve it. The app, which was created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a free digital tool that identifies birds from the song it hears in real time.
Robinson said: “What it is doing is getting people involved and bringing people closer to nature. But the nature they are getting involved with is much poorer than it was 50 years ago.”
Joella Manley, 27, an ecologist from Nottingham, is one of a growing number of younger people who have taken up birdwatching. “I love watching birds, especially little garden birds going about their business. My favourite bird is usually just whichever one I am currently watching, often a simple goldfinch or a long-tailed tit,” she said. “At any time you can see and appreciate birds, they make every day better.”
“Bird song is beautiful and distinct,” said Macfarlane. “A lapwing sounds like an old wireless set being twiddled. A nightingale sounds like drops of molten metal being plunged into water and taking form in sound.
“They remind us of the vastness and the mystery and the wonder of the world. And they’re doing it all of the time. But it is not enough to love the song and forget the singers. There is such hard work needed from government, from business, and from individuals to help birds thrive.”
The Guardian has recreated the dawn chorus using data provided by the British Trust for Ornithology and sound recordings submitted to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Xeno-canto by James Kennerly, Peter Kennerly, Mark Lewis, Jon Lowes and David Darrell-Lambert. Species were selected using the BTO’s Birds on your Doorstep tool according to the location of the original recording, and added to the audio landscape in line with annual species abundance data. Calls and songs of each species were isolated to build an illustration of the dawn chorus representing a year in each decade.
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