Artists
and musicians swoop to save one of UK’s most celebrated but endangered birds
Mon 29
Apr 2019 07.00 BST
Just as
Vera Lynn sang, the voices of nightingales are again being heard in Berkeley
Square in central London over
the hum of traffic and din of construction work.
The nightingale
has virtually disappeared from Britain over the past 50 years, its
population plummeting by 93% to fewer than 5,500 pairs. But now a chorus of
nightingale events are being arranged by artists, musicians and filmmakers to
raise awareness of the plight of one of the country’s most celebrated but
endangered birds.
Birdsong
was played on phones on Friday as the street artist ATM spent
the day painting a nightingale in a gallery on the square, and more than 750
people attended a concert on Monday, when the folk singer Sam Lee and other
musicians will duet with amplified nightingale song.
Let
Nature Sing, a track of pure birdsong including the nightingale, has been released
by the RSPB to highlight the loss of more than 40
million birds from the UK in 50 years.
The
modest-looking nightingale’s remarkable, mostly nocturnal song has inspired
writers ever since it was described by Pliny the Elder several thousand years
ago. Romantic poets from John Keats to Samuel Taylor Coleridge feted
this unobtrusive brown bird’s astonishing musicality.
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