294 Dawn in Shelve Wood Shropshire with cuckoo

Full Episode description

The moment we entered Shelve Wood we knew it was a perfect place to record. Shropshire is sparsely populated. There’s only one B road in the Shelve Wood area. The country lanes carry little traffic, and on the day we were on-location the skies were very often empty of aircraft. These qualities are highly valuable because they allow the delicate natural sound in the environment to reach your eardrums unaffected. Hearing the leaves of one city tree hushing in the wind is a nice thing to experience, but hearing thousands of trees all murmuring together across a huge reverberant natural space is an aural experience that brings nature connection on a completely different level.

Shelve Wood is a forest of diverse flora and fauna with mixed fir and deciduous trees. The ecosystem extends over approximately five hundred acres. The ground beneath the trees is intensely absorbent to sound, layer upon layer of fallen pine needles and leaves that must have lain untrodden by the feet of anything larger than the smallest of woodland creatures for decades. It’s the physical properties of the trees, their solid trunks, their branches and complex leaf systems that convert the energy of the wind into hearable sound, and over distance form resonant spaces that catch and amplify the calls of the birds.

* We made this recording in May 2025. the Lento box recorded within this location alone and non-stop for twelve hours. This one hour segment captures the dawn chorus just after sunrise. At 20 minutes a blackbird sings high up in the tree holding the microphones. Ear-witnessing this at such closeness is only possible using microphones recording alone. Later in the segment a cuckoo enters the forest to mid-left of scene. Capturing the sound of a cuckoo is something that seems almost miraculous to us, although we have noticed over the six years we’ve been making recordings to share via Radio Lento that hearing cuckoos is not as unusual as we had previously thought. Nonetheless actually capturing the echoing calls of the cuckoo in a reverberant forest at close range and over a long period of time has never been something we have ever been able to achieve, until now. So we thank this cuckoo for singing so sonorously, and for helping us to mark six years of Lento.

** Thank you for listening and for all your support. Every time we tie the Lento box to a tree and press record we think of you the listener, and how through the Lento mics you can be transported through your ears into these richly detailed natural places.

*** It’s Lento’s 6th birthday next weekend. Celebrate by buying us a birthday coffee?