When does birdsong stop?

Much as I love the frenzy of activity in May and the abundance of the dawn chorus at its peak, it’s the less hectic times that afford some of the best opportunities to get familiar with particular bird sounds, including some songs. 

In the early spring, the chorus is sparser, but you can really get to know a goldcrest, a treecreeper or a dunnock before all the extroverts have arrived. Likewise, in the late summer it’s often the presence of one bird singing - a yellowhammer or a skylark during a summer holiday - that imprints itself in the memory. 

However as I’ve found while writing the Shriek of the Week emails this year, my appreciation of when some of these species stop singing is a little fuzzier than I’d like. 

Some things are clear. You’re very lucky to hear a nightingale song after the middle of June (because nightingales have swapped all the glamourous stuff for croaks and whistles by that point). Or to hear a swift after the first week of August (because almost all have left their breeding grounds by then, and the few seen on passage are generally silent). 

But for many species there’s a grey area between the middle of June and the end of August where I would be hard pressed to say at what point they shut the shop. When does a meadow pipit stop singing? Or a mistle thrush? Or a dunnock?

In July, I found myself writing about how to identify reed and sedge warblers by song. These are birds I think of as later singers, and so I chose to focus on them at a time when many of the woodland and garden species have gone quiet. 

But then I started to wonder: at what point, really, do reed and sedge warblers transition from their jagged, chuntering songs into the more anonymous churrs and squeals that make up their contact calls - the noises made by family groups shouting at each other as they jump around the ditches, until the end of the summer.

Not for the first time, I realise that I’m at the edge of my knowledge here.

So for one, this August I’m keeping a record of when I’m still hearing birdsong.

And I’m also looking for data on this that may already be available, for the less obvious species.

• Is ‘last date heard singing’ collected by anyone in any systematic way?

• Are there historical data sets?

• Is the ‘date last heard’ changing along with ‘date first heard’ in the spring?

If you have answers to any of the above I’d be glad to hear from you.

~ Charlie

Footnote: I did hear a local reed warbler singing long, loud and clear on the 3rd August around 8am. Some comfort that my memory hasn’t completely betrayed me.