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Factual: Science & Nature: Nature & Environment

Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson presents a series of audio postcards.

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Soundstage: 5. Dawn Chorus

5. Dawn Chorus

BBC Radio 4 - Soundstage, 5. Dawn Chorus

Sound recordist Chris Watson introduces a dawn chorus from Suffolk.

Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson introduces the dawn chorus, captured near Aldeburgh in Suffolk.

From late March until mid-June, between 3am and 6am, there is a tremendous outpouring of song in the Suffolk woodlands. Resident birds are joined by migrant birds from Africa and Eastern Europe whose voices coalesce into an international chorus which fills our woodlands well before sunrise. 

Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson decided to try and capture a dawn chorus in a landscape he knew well. 

It was early May when he set out one evening down the old railway path which links Aldeburgh with Thorpeness. The first sounds he heard through the birch and alder trees, were not birds but the bells of Aldeburgh parish church nearly two miles to the south. 

The bells faded under the sounds rooks, jackdaws and pheasants returning to their roosts. There then followed the sounds of the night; owls, deer and foxes. 

At 2.30am Chris heard the first bird song, that of a nightingale, a beautiful solo voice in the darkness. Soon other birds joined the nightingale; robin, song thrush, blackbird and wren, until at 4am the chorus had developed to the extent that it was difficult to pick out any individual. 

With the first rays of daylight, the chorus began to subside and the pattern of song was changed by the late arrivals. Chris returned back along the footpath, accompanied by the cries of curlew rising off the marshes and heading inland – a perfect end to a wonderful dawn chorus. 

Producer: Sarah Blunt

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2015.

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