As a child growing up in south Yorkshire in the 1970s, my spring dawn chorus started early morning in the dark on Thorne Moors, a lowland peatbog with birch scrub, mature birch and willow woodland.  

A low mist would carpet the cotton-grasses, mixed with the resinous scent of birch buds. The ‘hoo-hoo-hooo’ of a long-eared owl in the willows broke the silence. Followed by the eerie ‘bleat’ of half a dozen snipe, the ‘flying nanny-goat’ my father called them, coming from over the marsh.  

A few birds sang all night – the argumentative chatter of a sedge warbler, the echoing tinny trill of a grasshopper warbler and an occasional sleepless robin.  

But then came a sound so clear in the dark – the nightingales. Starting slow, whispering, on a single repeated note for 20 seconds. Then the richest, most mellow liquid warble, proud resonant notes. These would be interrupted by an angry low call, as if swearing under its breath. I loved that each nightingale repeated its favourite phrases, as if showing off to a would-be mate.  

The first hint of blue on the eastern horizon and the few insomniac songbirds were joined by others.  First the surround-sound cuckoos, half a dozen birds calling from all over the Moors. Followed by the blackbird, a mellow fluting almost as deep as the nightingale. Song thrushes starting next, singing a tentative phrase then repeating it – or as Browning put it:  

‘he sings each song twice over, 
Lest you should think he never could recapture 
The first fine careless rapture!’ 

Within half an hour, the full chorus of warblers – the descending scales of dozens of willow warblers, blackcaps and garden warblers, the chatter of whitethroats, the metronomic shout of great tits and the warm, soothing purr of turtle doves.  

Near the moor edge, a couple of corn buntings, with their rattling metallic cascade of notes, like ‘jangling keys’.

The sheer volume of sound was amazing and completely enveloping.

Several of each species, singing or calling to each other, the cuckoo, the two-tone ‘teach-er teach-er’ of the great tit, two, three or four male blackcaps taking turns. 

I moved south in the 1980s, but still go to Thorne Moors in the first week of May every year, for my night walk and dawn chorus. Over the years, I hardly noticed the dawn chorus changing and subsiding.  

A few species disappeared completely: Yorkshire lost its nightingales in the early 2000s, partly as unmanaged scrub shaded over, and as mature woodlands were browsed by too many deer. 

Turtle doves and corn buntings disappeared as sources of seeds on nearby arable farmland declined; turtle doves and other migrants were hit by changing weather patterns and persecution on their migration across southern Europe. 

But the biggest change, easily ignored as our memory fades, is the slow and gradual loss of abundance.

This is most apparent between generations - my father’s ‘clouds of butterflies’ were more abundant than mine. But I have witnessed the ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ in my own life, too. 

Where there were 100 willow warblers, there are 50, 40, 30, 20… and soon, I’m listening to individual soloists, not to a chorus. That’s how I’d come to expect the dawn chorus in small woods in Cambridgeshire.

A range of songbirds starting up the same sequence and reaching a peak soon after dawn. For the attentive listener the modern ‘peak’ is quiet and patchy, not a chorus to be overwhelmed by.  

That is… until 2021, when I heard about Strawberry Hill. This 360-acre farm was taken out of arable production in 1988, and has since changed from open fields to grassland to an intricate mosaic of flower-rich grassland, hawthorn and blackthorn scrub and young woodland – ‘rewilding’ before the word was thought of. Nature has taken hold of the land and brought back what I didn’t know I’d lost.   

The statistics show something special: 35 singing nightingales, 60 willow warblers, 50 blackcaps, 40 whitethroats, dozens of thrushes, and even a handful of grasshopper warblers. And the volume of sound! A chorus that immerses you in sound and seizes your attention. You don’t know which way to look or listen.  

Strawberry Hill was a revelation to me: we don’t have to accept the decline in wildlife as inevitable. We can restore wildlife. And it’s not just for the birds – Strawberry Hill has the greatest abundance of caterpillars on the hawthorn and insects in the long grass of anywhere I’ve seen in decades. Insects that feed over 500 breeding pairs of songbirds.  

Brian Eversham is a lifelong naturalist, interested in birds, plants, insects and all wildlife. Previously a research ecologist, he’s worked for the Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire for 27 years, and is now Chief Executive.