As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Wednesday 1 May 2019

Bird lovers flock to Berkeley Square as nightingales return


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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