Birdsong Academy in 3 minutes

When we locked down in the spring of 2020, something very strange happened. Lots of people started asking whether the birds had got louder.

This is what happens when the cars are parked up, and the sun is shining, and when we have more time to notice what’s around us. And maybe when we have reason to contemplate what really matters too.

Around that time a few of us started to use Zoom to share the sounds of live birdsong, with those who wanted to hear the birds they loved but were stuck indoors or in the middle of town. People would dial in from their gardens, or from their daily exercise walks, or from their living room windows, or occasionally from their beds.

It was a kind of crowdsourced dawn chorus. We did it three times a week in that early lockdown, first thing in the morning. It became something that seemed to really help people connect with each other, as well as with the birds.

One of the interesting things about the conversations that were had in those calls is how often they turned to why some birds are hard to find nowadays. Why some people don’t have house sparrows or chaffinches or a song thrush around them anymore, or why they’ve not heard a turtle dove for years or a cuckoo.

It felt to me and to lots of other people that this was a moment of truth. Where the reality of what’s happening to nature suddenly became clearer.

Birdsong Academy has grown out of those early Zoom calls. We still do those in the spring, they are still free, and open to all.

But now we also do lots of other things too, in response to what people have asked for.

We put out a weekly newsletter from January to June. It features a different birdsong each week, in time with their arrival in the UK. It’s called Shriek of the Week.

We’ve developed a 10-week online course, which has run four times and begins again in February.

We’ve run a bird ID workshop for a cluster of farmers on the South Downs who wanted help with their winter bird counts. We designed an away day for a team at the charity Sightsavers.

We’ve done breeding bird surveys for local regenerative landscape projects.

And we’ve started a programme of walking workshops at Stanmer Park.

Over and over again, in all these different activities I’ve seen the joy that people get from simply tuning into what’s already there, and also the satisfaction of being able to put a name to some of these birds.

I believe this is one of the connections that is essential to the work we need to do to turn things around.

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This is a minor variation on a three-minute presentation Charlie gave at a recent climate and nature emergency community event in Hove, November 2022. If you’re interested in learning how to identify birds by sound, or have an idea for collaboration, get in touch.