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Nightingales at Hothfield Heathlands in June

c) Chris Gomersall 2020 Vision

On 19th May one hundred years ago the first outdoors broadcast by the BBC was of professional cellist Beatrice Harrison playing to and with nightingales in the garden of her Surrey home. Around a million listeners tuned in to the midnight broadcast, and she performed for similar outdoor broadcasts over the next twelve years.

On 18th May this year the Natural History Museum of Berlin ran a field trip in the Tiergarten in the centre of the city to teach about the more than 3,000 nightingales that migrate to Berlin every year. 

On the Reserve up to 6 singing nightingales have been observed this year, which is a welcome increase on previous years. They nest on the ground, or very low to the ground under scrub or among nettles, a loose gathering of leaves with a lining of grass, roots and hair, so this is another species sensitive to disturbance by dogs. Dense low scrub provides a safe space for parents and young foraging for insects in the leaf litter. Only the males sing, through until mid-June, at night to attract a mate, in the day to warn off rivals, and not from a high perch but often low down in a hedge, easily observed.

From mid-June males help feed nestlings and only use an alarm call resembling the croak of a frog. Crowd-sourced recordings made in Berlin have revealed over 2000 song patterns, but an individual bird will work on unending variations of around 190. The trills, gurgles, and whistles are in scratchy contrast to the mellifluous invention of the bird singing in Berkley Square, indeed the almost mechanically precise hard rapid “beats” have been compared to techno music. Some nightingales have been recorded singing non-stop for 20 hours and they seem to sing at their loudest between around 11pm and 3am but I haven’t personally checked that. Britain is at the limit of the nightingale’s range.

 

Nightingale in song

Nightingale in song

They winter in West Africa and seem to migrate across land and narrow sea crossings to Europe and only the southeast corner of England. By 2018 numbers had plummeted by 92% due to loss of habitat, placing them among the ‘Red Sixty-Seven’ birds on the UK Red List of endangered birds. At Knepp in 1999, just 7 nightingale territories were identified; post re-wilding, there were 40 singing males in 2021.

In June the heathland will be a flowery delight. Despite May roses in gardens, the orchids and cross-leaved heath are late so will be best in June. Sorrel already casts a bronze haze over rabbit-cropped turf, cotton grass nods across the main bog, with very dense communities of species in the tussocks and along the edge of the boardwalk; lousewort, tormentil and milkwort and various grasses and sedges in flower, sundew now visible. 

Major tree clearance around the bog will help these specialised plants spread and flourish. Fresh scrapes down grass slopes still look raw and bare but older ones have a thin patina of diminutive plants including mosses with fruiting capsules, buck’s horn plantain, and bird's-foot Ornithopus perpusillus with tiny white pea flowers. The black peaty mud dug up by the pigs is now coated in fresh green growth.  The tiniest of the buttercup family and Hothfield’s rarest plant, the three lobed water crowfoot appears to be spreading and the sphagnum moss translocation experiment of 2023 seems to have worked.

Volunteers standing at the top of steps they have installed at Hothfield Heathlands

The brilliant volunteers, have been improving access across the site, building steps down a steep woodland slope, using sand to build up muddy paths, put in new wider gates, suitable for wheelchairs and already appreciated by the moth trapping team with their barrows of equipment, alongside regular tree-popping and myriad other tasks.

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