November is the month when a broad alliance of creators - including poets, authors, scientists, film makers, visual artists, environmentalists, musicians and composers - celebrate the many ways in which we respond to the nature that surrounds us.  At this year's New Networks for Nature authors Richard Mabey, Richard Kerridge, Mark Cocker, Paul Evans and Derek Niemann, poets John Barlow, Jessica Penrose and Matthew Paul and composer Peter Cowdrey are among the artists who will be joining top conservation scientists and commentators.  Together they explore the ways we engage with the natural world, examining how these are influenced by the values and perceptions of society.

This, and other events are listed in our updated Whats On page.  To add an event, please use the contact form.

Later in the month our Re:Tweets of the Day continue with a bird that ranches insects and that inspired an 11-year old composer back in the 1890s.  We will hear a more recent work the evokes the sounds of its subtropical forest habitat.  Stay tuned!

The quetzal effect was first recognised by California-based acoustic engineer David Lubman in 1998. Nico Declercq of Ghent University was impressed when he heard the echo for himself at an acoustics conference in Cancún in 2002. After the conference, he, Lubman and other attendees took a trip to Chichén Itzá to experience the chirp of El Castillo at first hand.

Declercq's calculations show that, although there is evidence that the Mayans engineered the pyramid to produce surprising sounds, they probably couldn't have predicted exactly what they would resemble.  Declercq noticed that when visitors climbed the steps of the 24-metre high pyramid, the echoes seemed to sound just like rain falling into a bucket of water.

He suggests that this, rather than the quetzal call, could have been the aim of El Castillo's acoustic design. "It may not be a coincidence," he says, “the rain god played an important part in Mayan culture.

"Either you believe it or you don't." Declercq is now sceptical of the quetzal theory - not least because he has heard similar effects at other religious sites. At Kataragama in Sri Lanka, for example, a handclap by a staircase leading down to the Menik Ganga river produces an echo that sounds like ducks quacking. 

In 1975 British progressive rock band camel released the instrumental, orchestrated concept album The Snow Goose, inspired by the Paul Gallico short story.  The album's success led to a sell out concert at the Royal Albert Hall featuring the London Symphony Orchestra.  Last year Camel came out of retirement with a concert at the Barbican Centre and subsequent European tour, performing The Snow Goose in its entirety for the first time since 1975.

Gallico's The Snow Goose is a parable on the power of friendship and love, set against the horror of war. It documents the growth of a friendship between Philip Rhayader, an artist living a solitary life in an abandoned lighthouse in the Essex marshlands, and a young local girl, Fritha. A wounded snow goose is found by Fritha and, as the friendship with Rhayader blossoms, the bird is nursed back to flight.  It revisits the lighthouse for several years on migration. Fritha grows up, and Rhayader and his small sailboat are lost in the Dunkirk evacuations.  The snow goose, which was with Rhayader, returns briefly to Fritha.  A German pilot destroys Rhayader's lighthouse and all of his work, except for one portrait Fritha saves after his death: a painting of her as the artist first saw her—a child, with the wounded snow goose in her arms.

Camel’s Music Inspired by the Snow Goose – to give it its full title – opens with recordings of marshland birds, in a section entitled The Great Marsh.  For the next forty minutes or so, the mood switches back and forth, tracing the emotional trajectory of the story.

As previewed earlier in the week, here I am in the ICC in Birmingham with a few hundred fellow RSPB members.  I'm the luminous one in the distance.  

The Coto Doñana in Andalucía is where nature and culture hybridise like nowhere else I know.   This Saturday I shall be in Birmingham to speak at the RSPB’s AGM on Doñana:  Portrait of a Wilderness. 

The main point of the talk will be to illustrate the value of EU-level cooperation, supported by EU law, in conserving Europe’s most precious places.  This in the face of an onslaught by the UK Government, the new EU Commission and other short-term interests who are committed to watering down the protection afforded by current legislation.

It’s a subject I covered earlier this year in an episode of BBC Radio 4’s Costing the Earth, which you can hear by clicking the button:

For Costing the Earth, reporter Julian Rush and I met up in the village of El Rocío, on the edge of Doñana’s vast marshes, before driving off into the wilderness.  We wanted to see how Doñana had fared sixteen years since we last met there, when Julian was reporting for Channel 4 TV.

Back then, Doñana, indeed all Spain, was reeling from the country’s worst environmental catastrophe.  A reservoir containing highly toxic mining waste had collapsed, spilling 5 million cubic metres of lead, arsenic and cadmium-laden mud and acid water.  A tsunami of poison flowed into the River Guadiamar, one of the main sources of water for the marshes of Doñana, which lay some 45 kilometres downstream.

En route, the wave of mud and acid killed everything in the river, and spread over 4,500 hectares of farmland, which will never again produce food.  It flooded some of the most important bird habitat, killing all aquatic life and contaminating soils.  Plants absorbed the heavy metals, becoming toxic to anything that fed on them.

The full story, and its aftermath, is related in Costing the Earth.  What proved to be a short-term disaster had its silver lining.  With considerable EU financial support, the pollution was cleaned up.  The contaminated farmland was allowed to rewild and has become a green corridor linking Doñana with the Sierra Morena to the north, and hopefully, one day reuniting the fragmented Iberian lynx population.

On Saturday, I will touch only briefly on the other Doñana: the Doñana of music, dance and pilgrimage.  So this is my chance to celebrate the cradle of flamenco;  and how fitting that this is also the Spanish name for one of Doñana’s great symbols, the flamingo. 

Etymologists cannot agree on whether the bird was named after the gypsy dances recalled in its strutting, head-and-wing flicking display; or the other way round.  What is in no doubt, is that the marshes of Doñana and the surrounding provinces of Huelva, Seville and Cádiz, is where flamenco and flamencos are most at home.

During my thirty-odd visits to Doñana, over the last 25 years, I have been unable to disentangle my sense of the landscape, its smells, its sounds, its birds, its coarseness, its rhythms, natural and otherwise, its troubles and its blessings.  Nor, in the lyrics to the Fandangos de Huelva, the Sevillanas, the Soleás and all the other Andalucian song styles, does any such separation exist.

For this reason, re-reading my birdwatching notebooks covering a quarter century of visits, is to smell the tang of eucalyptus and to hear the insistent clapping – palmas -  of flamenco:

Walking back to the hotel...

....to the piping scops and the k’tocking red-necked nightjar
and half-asleep coots in the black marshes
and clapping.... clapping....

The cante jondo approaches the rhythm of the birds and the natural music of the black poplar and the waves. It is a rare example of primitive song, the oldest of all Europe, where the ruins of history, the lyrical fragment eaten by the sand, appear live like the first morning of its life.  Federico Garcia Lorca 1931

Nice to be invited by my RSPB colleagues to write a guest blog about hen harriers and their role in inspiring my Skydancer piece for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra.  Click on the button to read the blog and other celebrations of the stunning hen harrier.

A few weeks ago we Re:Tweeted the Australian magpie, and it’s back to the island continent for perhaps its greatest songster.  These two species create the sonic backdrop to so many Australian landscapes; it is not surprising that since the early twentieth century composers have been inspired by them.  


This morning Miranda Krestovnikoff presented the bird that has probably inspired more composers than any other non-European species.  In the latest of our Re:Tweets we look at the pied butcherbird of Australia.  Click the button to hear the original Radio 4 Tweet of the Day.

Indeed, birdsong seems to be an especially important influence among composers seeking to add a truly Australian voice to western tradition.  Henry Tate (1873-1926) actively encouraged this and two more generations of composers, from the late Peter Sculthorpe (1928-2014) to Brett Dean (b.1961) and John Rodgers (b. 1962) have appropriated birdsong and other natural sounds as a key ingredient in developing an Australian music that is today among the most vibrant and constantly evolving in the western world.

For Tate, the butcherbird was a particularly valuable resource.  “The slow and dreamy prelude of the butcherbird naturally expands into musical sentences.”  David Lumsdaine (b. Sydney 1931) has created recorded soundscapes, dance pieces and a string quartet based on butcherbird song.  He writes “the pied butcherbird is a virtuoso of composition and improvisation: the long solo develops like a mosaic, through the varied repetition of its phrases. In the course of the song, some elements remain constant, some elements transform through addition and elimination. The bird is a virtuoso of decoration: there is an extraordinary delicacy in the way it articulates the harmonic course of its song with microtonal inflections...”

There has even been a PhD thesis, by Hollis Taylor, on composers’ use of the butcherbird song, exploring whether birdsong can be thought of as music in its own right.  Taylor concludes  that the butcherbird’s “elaborate song culture seems to overreach biological necessity, indicating an aesthetic appreciation of sound.”

Composer, performer, and naturalist Ron Nagorcka (b. 1948) grew up on a sheep farm in Western Victoria.  Artamidae (2004) is his five-movement suite celebrating a family of Australian songbirds: the grey butcherbird, Australian magpie, black currawong, pied butcherbird, and grey currawong.  He uses a fretless electric guitar to achieve the particular microtonal details he identifies as just intonation - the natural effect of diving or multiplying pitch frequencies in simple ratios.  This makes butcherbird song sound slightly out of tune to western ears.

I’m not sure I agree with the analysis, but I do like Nagorcka’s idea that being literally in tune with nature (as opposed to western scales) is something a female listens for in selecting a mate.

The last word should go to Brett Dean (b.1961) who, like Sculthorpe, often finds the music through which to express a deep concern for the environment.  His Pastoral Symphony incorporates a recording of the butcherbird.  Dean comments: “Sure, we all love nature, but what we love more are all the trappings of modern living... certainly more than the desire to stop and bask in the glory of a single butcherbird, perhaps the most magical sound found on the whole Australian continent. This piece, then, is about glorious birdsong, the threat that it faces, the loss, and the soulless noise that we're left with when they're all gone.”

Three thousand light years is a long way from Earth - but Vali Ohm have made the journey in quick time. It's the distance between their latest album, Fragile Earth, and their previous space-rock album 3000 Light Years, a homage to the sounds of the 1970s. Vali Ohm's Danny Jackson charted the journey with NATURAL LIGHT's Laurence Rose, in an interview for The Ecologist.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow's premiere of my Skydancer, a short piece written for the London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra. 

It's at 7.30 on Saturday at St.George the Martyr, Borough High Street

Today is National Poetry Day and for the next three days ZSL London Zoo is hosting its first ever annual poetry weekend, exploring the power of nature and wildlife in poetry.  Special events include a poetry trail around the zoo grounds, workshops and readings.  

Four contemporary poets are featured on Saturday lunchtime.  Fiona Sampson, is editor of Poem magazine, former editor of Poetry Review and has been nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize for her own work. Her most recent collection of poems, Coleshill, offers a “stunning engagement with both sensation and locale, and perhaps most importantly the rural environs in which much of it is rooted.”  Pascale Petit was featured on this site a few weeks ago and is the author of six collections of poetry, including Fauverie (Seren, 2014), The Zoo Father (Seren, 2001) and What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (Seren, 2010), shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize, Wales Book of the Year, and named as a book of the year in the Observer. Ruth Padel is a renowned poet and non-fiction author, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, of the Zoological Society of London and a member of the ZSL Council. Her poetry collections includie Soho Leopard (Chatto, 2004)  and The Mara Crossing (Chatto, 2012), as well as the novel Where the Serpent Lives (Abacus, 2011). 

Niall Campbell is a poet originally from South Uist in the Western Isles. He received both an Eric Gregory Award and a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship in 2011, winning the Poetry London Competition in 2013.  His pamphlet, After the Creel Fleet, was released in 2012 by Happenstance Press, whilst Moontide, his first collection, was published by Bloodaxe earlier this year.For the inaugural ZSL Poetry Competition the theme is conservation. The competition is open to all ages but entrants must enter in their age category.

The inaugural ZSL Poetry Competition theme is conservation. The competition is open to all ages and closes Sunday 12 October 2014.