I went last night to hear the nightingales sing at Fingringhoe. This Essex Wildlife Trust reserve formed out of an old gravel quarry is a nightingale stronghold, of county-wide and national significance. I had never knowingly heard one sing live, only on the radio, and I thought it would probably be very beautiful, and that if I heard their song knowing for sure it was nightingales, I would be more confident about identifying them if I ever heard them again.
The song was as beautiful as I'd expected it to be. It is very loud, heard live and close up, deep and melodic, interspersed with strange, atmospheric chucks. I recommend live nightingales as an experience. The snag was that as the reserve shuts at 5.00pm, the only way to get in at dusk is to join a guided nightingale walk. This is what we did, but what I had not expected was that our tour guide would talk. Loudly. Practically all the time. He regaled us with interesting facts about nightingales (they migrate from Africa, they arrive in early April and leave around July or August, they return to the same territory, only the males sing, they nest quite close to the ground in thickets. OK, they were interesting facts, but I'd much rather we'd been told them before the start of the tour and then gone and listened to the birds). When he ran out of Interesting Facts about nightingales he filled in the silences with other facts about how big the quarry used to be, and what good wildlife habitats former quarries made, and how the reserve was managed. Our fellow tourists joined in cheerfully, wanting to know if nightingales did sing in Berkeley Square, and informing us that in Keats' time they sang on Hampstead Heath, and vying with each other to demonstrate their superior knowledge of birds, and personal acquaintance with professionals high up in the world of nature conservation. Why? Why were they there if they didn't want to listen to the thing we'd supposedly come to hear? So that they could tick off 'heard nightingale' in their twitchers' score books of bird encounters? They all seemed to be enjoying themselves.
My companion and I hung back from the group as far as we could, and did more or less manage to hear the nightingales singing with only a distant racket of human voices. Fingringhoe as night falls is a magical place, with the birds singing among the trees and scrub, and the lights flashing on the Colne buoys. There was a crescent moon, and the tide was very low. As well as the nightingales we heard an enthusiastic cuckoo. So I'm glad I went, but I was reminded why I don't belong to any nature study groups, apart from the beekeepers, and generally avoid guided tours like the plague.
I bought a nightingale CD, produced by the British Trust for Ornithology, which starts with the famous recordings of Beatrice Harrison playing her cello with a nightingale, and the wartime sound of a vast bomber fleet gradually approaching as a nightingale sings, then goes on into field recordings of the birds' song. I thought we could listen to it on the veranda on hot summer evenings, and pretend there were nightingales in the wood (the officer in charge of engineering projects looked mutinous at the idea of rigging speakers in the wood, and said it would be very difficult and that it would be wrong to fake nightingales). By the time it gets hot enough to sit outside at dusk the nightingales would not be singing, since they would be well on their way back to Africa, but as my grasp of ornithology is distinctly shaky I shan't let that put me off.
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