Today we celebrate birdsong around the world with International Dawn Chorus 2020!

The magic of the Dawn Chorus is best experienced by being immersed right in it!

You need to set your alarm clock for Very Early O’Clock (around 4.30am!), wrap up super warm, and go out into your garden (for now) to let the song wash over you. If you can’t bear that there are other ways, like opening your window and listening from the comfort of your bed!

Different species start singing at different times. Robins are adapted to low light and so start singing first. Song may carry up to 20 times as far in the still morning air. As it gets light enough to see properly, birds then are able to seek out their breakfast, and so the chorus gradually diminishes.

Why do birds sing at all? This is a really complex and big question and birds communicate with sound in so many different ways, not only using song. See Birdlife for a great article on this. They are proclaiming territory, they are doing their best to attract a mate, and they are stimulating their mates to come into condition to lay. Amazingly, song is learned before they even hatch from the egg! Read Tim Birkhead‘s amazing book Bird Sense for an in-depth look.

Lets look at a very common bird, the Wren. It sings 64 notes in 8 seconds and so to us this sounds a bit of a blur! Check out this a brilliant BBC clip by wildlife sound recordist genius Chris Watson in which he slows the recording of a wren’s song down to 50% and 25% allowing us to see “something of the wealth and depth of information that’s in birdsong.”