Sam Lee

Of course I wouldn't be doing this if I had any inkling, and we've researched this a lot, is this affecting the birds in a negative way?

And we know we've only had an increase in population here, so just to allay fears that this might be affecting them in a sensitive mating time.

What I am aware of is that nightingales are highly playful with each other and indeed other sounds, biophony, anthropophony, all the kind of sounds of the world.

They sit by motorways, they sit in the centre of Berlin by traffic lights.

These are birds that are very comfortable with humans and in fact have an ancient history of being in close proximity and making music with them.

Humans have been playing with nightingales for thousands of years, I now find out.

But for me, there isn't a perfect human word in our language referring to our behaviours and emotions that can capture actually what's really happening.

The word play is there.

They don't need to sing all night.

It's an expensive gesture.

They're doing it because they love being expressive, beautiful, daring, strange things that...

need to make art.

What that need is in us, I'll never quite know and why we do it.

But when they hear humans,

they just, you can hear how they just start to respond and acknowledge us.

It's not competitive, it's not rejectionary, it's just joy.

So this is a bit of kind of couples therapy in some ways for us in nature, of holding Nightingale close to us as we learn to let go of the things we love.

This is a practice I think we need, facing the future that we are going to inherit.

Nightingales are clinging on in this country in numbers around five and a half thousand pairs only left.

It's an absolute fraction of what we once had and that number is also rapidly declining such that at rates of loss we suspect that