The joys of jamming with nightingales

For the past 10 years, every spring, Sam Lee has taken up residence in the woods in Sussex to sing with the nightingales that descend upon its coppice. The age-old question of whether man and animal can communicate has returned again in the age of machine learning, as computers set about trying to interpret animal sounds.

Lee is a folk musician first and is playing at Glastonbury this year. For him, interpretation of a nightingale is not the question. “It is jazz spirit,” he says. “All jazz musicians are complex people underneath, and nightingales a complex bird.”

The male has one of the most challenging of all birdsongs, an improvisation of whistles, buzzes, chugs, slurs and croons, sung in darkness to attract a mate. “There’s a deep intelligence there. To evolve such a complexity of song, it’s more than just trying to indicate their strengths. It’s communicating something to each other of knowledge and we don’t understand what that knowledge is.”

Singing with nightingales is not a new phenomenon. It entered the British imagination in 1924. Beatrice Harrison, a cellist who debuted Delius’s Cello Concerto and was a favourite of Elgar, had been practising in her garden in Oxted in Surrey when a nightingale joined in. She wrote to Lord Reith, director-general of the BBC, then in its infancy.

“She had convinced Lord Reith somehow to get technicians to try out this new technology of outside recording capabilities with a microphone to come into her garden, to wind out miles of cable, bring massive trucks of batteries, from a two-year-old BBC,” says Lee.

The evening was broadcast live. The nightingale declined to join in for her rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov or Elgar but when Harrison struck up the Londonderry Air — a tune now better known as “Danny Boy” — the nightingale sang. The performance mesmerised the nation.

On its 90th anniversary in 2014, Lee wrote to the BBC suggesting it should run a documentary on it and they asked him to front it. That year the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) report The State of the UK’s Birds found that the nightingale population had declined by 43 per cent in the previous 20 years.

Wintering in sub-Saharan Africa, as do other species such as the cuckoo and the swift, the nightingale flies north to Europe and the Asian steppe, to its mating grounds. Whereas there had been tens of thousands up until the 1970s, the UK was down to about 5,550 males in 2012.

Harrison’s recording is “an apocryphal tale of Britain’s unique experience of discovering the musicality of the nightingale”, says Lee. Different cultures have long played music with nightingales.

In Afghan folklore, it was the players of the rubab and tar — traditional lutes — who, Lee says, were said to have achieved mastery of the instrument when a nightingale comes to perch on the lute’s tuning pegs.

When recording the documentary for the BBC, Lee went out with a classical string trio to see if he could lure the nightingale into a jam. “The bird started to sing back with us, and I was like: this is unbelievable.”

This began the decade-long ritual of the retreat to the Sussex woods and also another in Gloucestershire, both private locations, where paying guests came to join him on a twilight walk to sit beneath a nightingale.

“If you start making music, they don’t fly off. They carry on singing, increase their volume, adapt their song, augment their music to come to key with you into rhythm. They harmonise.” It is not indiscriminate. Lee takes out various musicians with him. “With some musicians the bird will go absolutely nuts. It’s not about the instrument, it’s about the instrumentalist. They’re great recognisers of humans and spirit, and there are a thousand stories of how they’ve just known exactly what’s going on: somebody’s carrying grief. Somebody who’s electric. Somebody who’s really grounded. Newborn babies — they will always appear for newborn babies.”

The closest Lee has ever come was when he brought his daughter, then six weeks old, now six years old, to one of his events. “By day I went out and a nightingale flew up on to the branch right above and just blasted song.”

Lee knows 12 pairs in the Sussex woodland. He recognises the returners and the first-timers. “You recognise their decorative technique,” he says. Nightingales return to the same territory every year and once the fledglings are mature, they do too, fighting it out with brothers for territory.

If you start making music, they don’t fly off. They carry on singing, increase their volume, adapt their song, augment their music to come to key with you into rhythm. They harmonise

The BTO suggests the decline in numbers could be attributed to deer browsing. Now in record populations in the UK, muntjac in particular destroy the understory in which the birds breed: nightingales are ground nesters feeding off beetles and bugs.

Berlin, where there are few deer and a lot of scrubland, has around 1,500 breeding pairs, Lee says: “the hedgerows and messiness” of the city pay off. The decline may also have to do with climate change — the insects on which they feed hatch sooner and are out of sync with their arrivals — or to do with their wintering grounds in Africa, which is also facing changes in agriculture and climate.

Numbers are higher in Europe where it is warmer, so they have two mating seasons, as opposed to just the one in the UK, where they now only go as far north as the Humber, between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. In Europe they also appear to be less specific about the habitat they need. In the UK, “if it is not ideal, they won’t nest. The males won’t locate. Females won’t find a mate.”

But part of the reason for the UK decline is the country’s urge to build, says Lee. “The brownfield sites — a lot of birds like them as they are usually quite biodiverse. They’re being sold off and turned into development. If it is a newt or bat you can’t go there. But nightingales are not a Schedule 1 listed species so you can build.”

The nightingale is not the only songbird that Lee believes he can vibe with. He is part of the opening ceremony for a new Glastonbury venue, the Tree Stage in the Woodsies area, alongside Merlin Sheldrake and Emily Eavis, where he will perform a sound and light show around a 300-year-old Somerset oak, upturned with its roots in the air. The idea is to reimagine the tree as living, and home to birds such as the turtle dove and nightingale.

He is already singing alongside the turtle dove, which faces extinction in the UK. Lee leads a pilgrimage to Knepp, the rewilded estate in West Sussex, which increased its number to 20 singing males in 2021. On the walk he plays Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 1907 wax-cylinder recording of pub landlord David Penfold’s rendition of the old English folk song about the dove.

“They are very shy birds but almost every year we’ve heard them turring at dawn.” Musically, he tries to find a low resonant baritone with them. “They don’t improvise but it is like hearing the rarest of songs.”

The curlew, a moorland bird, is another he is trying to find a musical language for. It has “a heartbreaking crooning like a dying siren”, he says. Then there is the nightjar, which churrs and beats its wings rhythmically. “It sounds a little bit more like a sort of radiophonics workshop job,” says Lee, referring to the old audio departments that develop sounds. Ashdown Forest in East Sussex has had some success in keeping up its nightjar numbers through specialist grazing.

Lee describes the nightingale as “decorators of silence”. “They sing and they are quiet. They listen.”

Communication will not happen in a conventional way. Lee mentions an evening in the Sussex woods last week. One nightingale, a usually reliable participant in the evening, was holding back from Lee and his musicians.

“So I started singing an old folk song,” says Lee. He sang the line: “I sat myself down to view all around, and the song the nightingale echoes all around.” At that moment, “right on cue it burst into song”, he says.

His audience was astonished, as was Lee. “They are listening in to us,” he says. “To ask or demand it sing would have no impact. But to sing to it — that is a different language. I often think song is the closest thing to prayer and the bird hears it in very different ways. Music is a very powerful form of communication — not of the intellect but of the heart.”

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