89 The birds of the leafy ravine – a tonic for tired minds (best with headphones)

Full Episode description

We’re going back to early June this year, to the rich and intermingled singing of birds that happens at dawn throughout the spring and early summer. In Britain it’s called the dawn chorus, a behaviour associated with song birds during the breeding season. 

Captured by a lone pair of microphones tied to a tree, above the watery and precipitous ravine that runs into the infamous Todbrook Reservoir at the Cheshire / Derbyshire border, this segment is from just before four o’clock in the morning. It can be hard to distinguish the different songs, but in amongst the mellifluous tunes there are song thrushes, blackcaps, blackbirds and robins, resonating in the fresh morning air of the ravine. From left to right the watery flow of the stream fills the space, and in the fields beyond, sheep and lambs can be heard. 

At four minutes some things with hooves, perhaps several small deer, scramble past along the precipitous path about thirty feet below the microphones. One small fleeting drama, on the cusp of a perfect June day. Far out on the right, where the valley opens out into the reservoir, occasional echoes of cars spill over from the country road between Macclesfield and Whaley Bridge. If, from inside their steel boxes, the occupants could have known about the dawn chorus from down in this secret valley, maybe they’d have stopped, turned off their engines, and listened to a phenomenon so few of us ever really get to hear.