It’s May Day, at 4.51am, the nightingales are singing, and I’m about to start livestreaming the dawn chorus from Knepp Estate for Reveil8, a collective sound work, as it starts tracking the live sounds of sunrise across the world for the next 25 hours, finishing at 6am on the 2 May, International Dawn Chorus Day. 

Around 4am I started walking out in the moonlight, accompanied by the distant sound of Nightingales. By 5am the dawn chorus was in its full glorious flow and I was being treated to a cosy serenade by a Nightingale perched in the sallow eager to impress any females flying overhead.

As Artist-In-Residence here I'm recording soundscapes from the scrubland to capture the Knepp rewilding success story, of increasing biodiversity, including bird diversity as you can hear in this recording. As the former arable fields become thorny scrub, a habitat now almost totally erased from the wider countryside, it provides nesting habitat for a remarkable number of Nightingales. Also listen out for the Cuckoo, White Storks clattering their beaks, Song Thrush, Wren, Blackbirds, Blackcaps, Pheasant, Crows, Blue Tits, and a late entry by the Tawny Owl.

The Knepp Nightingales: The Owl and the Nightingale

Hazel Reeves