Welcome to Wednesday with Ewen

The Dawn Chorus by Chris Watson (in Icons of England, edited by Bill Bryson)

A jumble of warbled notes tumbling down through the bare branches of a large beech tree was the starting point for me this year. It was mid-January. A mistle thrush, head thrown back, was singing powerfully into the face of a cold wind from the highest point in the canopy. I was grateful to that bird. Not only did the song lift my spirits on an otherwise cold and grey day, but it also reminded me of what was to come. This single bird song, these solo notes, would develop into a chorus of bird songs, gradually stirring across the whole of England. 
As the January daylight lengthened, other birds joined in. Robins began their evensong; a song thrush established a song post on a television aerial and broadcast its beautiful repertoire of repeated phrases. And from deep within the leafless twigs of our cotoneaster hedge, I heard the muted tones of blackbird subsong—a quiet and peculiar rehearsal for the full performance during the weeks to come. It’s in the woodlands, however, where the volume of song builds most. Agile nuthatches pipe their sweet notes from high branches and on early mornings the still atmosphere vibrates with one of early spring’s most exciting ‘songs’—great spotted woodpeckers drumming, rattling a tattoo on a favourite tree. 
These birds are our resident solo performers, advertising for a mate or establishing and defending a territory. During February we can isolate and localize these individuals as pinpoints of sound in the awakening woodland canopy. And then, one day in March, when the sound builds and the intensity increases, there is a change. I hear it twice or more before I actually stop and listen . . . Is it the end of a wren’s song? An aberrant chaffinch phrase? No. It is the sound of the first willow warbler. Unseen but clearly heard—a silvery descending song from somewhere above. Within moments, my ears also pick up another recent migrant’s tune—the jazz-like rhythm of the onomatopoeic chiffchaff. Over the next couple of weeks these warblers are joined by redstarts, pied flycatchers and secretive blackcaps. Eventually, the line-up is complete.
In late April, I always keep a weather eye open for a high-pressure system over Northumberland, and then make my move. I arrive on the edge of ‘my’ woodland in the middle of the night (around 2.30 a.m.) and cable a stereo microphone sixty metres away, underneath a small stand of oak trees. Perched on my camping stool, with headphones on, I listen and wait. At 3.12 a.m., a redstart sings and is quickly followed by a robin—with a territorial reply across the clearing—then song thrush, wren and blackbird.
The notes, phrases and songs mix and melt into a rich wall of sound, and this dawn chorus seems to light the spark for sunrise. At our latitudes I believe we have the very best dawn chorus in the world. Characterized by its slow development—a kind of evolution each new year—all the solo performances coalesce into a new sound and release an outpouring of song from our woodlands. It’s our own private chorus that transforms the darkness into light.