Watching Birds – The Dawn Chorus

… “I don’t know anything about consciousness,” Zen master, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, once declared. “I just try to teach my students how to hear the birds sing” …

Continuing my series of posts on the mindfulness of watching birds this post, a heads up for International Dawn Chorus Day (Sunday 4th May), encourages us to listen to birds as well as watch. 

Taking place on the first Sunday of May, International Dawn Chorus Day is the worldwide celebration of nature’s greatest symphony. All across the world people rise early to revel in the sweet sound of birdsong.  And remember you don’t have to head out to a nature reserve, you can always just open your window – and listen!

But not everyone is able to get up before dawn nor lucky enough to have birds singing outside their window. So create your own (virtual) Dawn Chorus right here from the playlist. Play singly or choose two or three to play simultaneously; Imagine you’re out for an early walk in a nearby park or some woods, or rambling along a country lane. Let your imagination run wild!

The Dawn Chorus – Playlist

Have fun but please note that repeatedly playing multiple players can fill up your browsers cache causing a loss of audio. Manually clearing the cache will restore the sound.

The list isn’t exhaustive and there’s many more perhaps I could have included. The nightingale an obvious one – though you’ll be hard pushed to hear one nowadays. Maybe I should do a follow up with some more birdsong … what birds would you like to hear?

Artist Biography 

The stunning painting of ‘Before the Sunrise’ was painted by Richard Bostock using acrylic on canvas, and kindly reproduced with his permission. He wrote of his experience …

Just before the sun rises a great intensity of light and colour illuminates the sky whilst the trees remain, for a few minutes at least, in darkness and shadow. Like musical notes, colours come to me. It is not invented, it is there, exaggerated yes. I want to make my colours sing like the birds in the trees that I paint …

After a varied career including a stint in the army, making teddy bears for M&S and teaching art, Richard Bostock started painting full time in 2001, although he’d drawn for as long as he can remember and art has always had a very special place in his life. Colour is of central in importance to his work. It is his hope that this universal language makes his work more accessible and will prove a catalyst for long term engagement.

Richard is inspired by Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Ivon Hitchens and Howard Hodgkin and as you might expect he is also profoundly influenced by Van Gogh and Matisse and other wonderful artists of the school of Gustav Moreau.

You can find this and more of his visually stunning light-filled work here on his website …

Authors Notes

The Dawn Chorus soundscape was mixed and produced in MixPad (NCH Software) using birdsong recordings from  Xeno-Canto  – a website dedicated to sharing bird sounds from all over the world.  All except that of the chaffinch which was originally recorded by Ludwig Koch and published on the first commercial record of birdsong ever made – Songs of Wild Birds in 1936 (excuse the crackle in the background – it is from rather an old record!). And the blackbird which was recorded recently in his back garden by Steve Jones (Change Therapy), on his iPhone. You can easily try this yourself if you have a smartphone with an audio recording app or the basic voice memo widget

All other birdsong recordings are sourced from  Xeno-Canto – and used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs4.0 license.

Thanks for reading and listening. And if you can, this Sunday, just stop for a moment and let yourself hear the birds sing!

Lastly here’s a beautiful piece of inspirational music called ‘Birdsong’, originally composed by Ludovico Einaud, to play you out … (for a bit of fun try playing some of the birdsongs from the playlist along with it!)