In 2008 mother-of-four Lisa Saunders noticed that the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary had lost a host of familiar words, and had gained some new ones.  Mrs Saunders was concerned to see the loss of words associated with the Church, such as Altar, Bishop and Chapel.  In had come Apparatus, Blog and Creep.  Then in Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairytales author Sara Maitland pointed out that it was the language of nature that was hardest-hit in the OJD's cull: words like Acorn, Bluebell and Catkin. Childhood in the Oxford University Press's world has shifted from one of nature and Christmas, to one of celebrity, cyberspace and fear of strangers.

Six years and another edition on, half a dozen cohorts of the OJD's target market have now been provided with a lexicography for the increasingly interior, solitary and urbanised world they inhabit rather than enthused with words to describe a world they have yet to explore.  

In the days before Christmas we will celebrate some lost words and call for them to be reinstated.  We start today with ten of the words you won't find in recent editions of the OJD.

Acorn  Acorns, and the mighty oaks a few of them will become, play a vital role in forest ecology.  Ironically, food chain is one of the new terms added to the Junior Dictionary, while the acorn, and many other vital parts of the food chain, have been taken out.

Making tiny tea-sets from acorn cups, or drawing faces on the acorns to create strange woodland creatures - we all did it.

Bluebell In a Plantlife survey the bluebell was overwhelmingly voted the nation’s favourite flower, revealing a strong cultural connection and a national love of the stunning carpets they form in our ancient woods each spring. 

The UK has around 50% of the world’s population making our bluebell woodlands unique and internationally important.

In suburban areas, most bluebells are hybrids due to the invasiveness of the garden variety, the Spanish bluebell.

Kingfisher Every budding birdwatcher's eye is drawn to the page with the kingfisher on it.  Possibly our brightest bird, yet difficult to see:  a real test for a young naturalist's fieldcraft.

But sit quietly, and it is not unheard of for one to suddenly appear on the tip of a fishing-rod.

Before we continue - why does this matter?  Firstly, compared with a generation ago, when 40% of children regularly played in natural areas, now only 10% do so, while another 40% never play anywhere outdoors.  Ever.  Obesity, anti-social behaviour, friendlessness and fear are the acknowledged consequences.  As they grow up (with a lower life expectancy than their parents - the first time in recorded history that has happened), we can expect an incomprehension of the natural world and an inability to manage its delicate balance, or to fix it when the balance goes wrong.

Although the starling is in serious decline, there are places where kids can still witness its jaw-dropping aerial displays.  They just can't look up the bird as, along with the lark, the starling is already extinct in the pages of the Junior Dictionary.  They can record the break-out of pussy willow buds in spring, but they can't check how to spell catkin.

And like a premature obituary to natural play, the conker is gone, along with the tree that bears it, as both the horse chestnut and its fruit have been excised. The joy of catching a minnow may still be had, but not written about.  The Oxford University Press claims that a dictionary is for recording language and its trends, not governing it.  But while the OJD's senior counterpart may add the occasional workaround or high muckety-muck, no word is ever deleted from the grown-up Oxford English Dictionary.

If children are to learn about ash, beech, brook, cowslip, fern, fungus, gorse, hazel, hazelnut, heather, pasture, primrose, stoat, sycamore, violet, weasel and willow they will need an earlier edition.  The latest offers MP3 Player, celebrity, voicemail, chatroom, cut and paste (to go with the extant words paste and cut) and the aforementioned creep.  

In the run-up to the latest edition, OUP put out a press release “revealing fascinating insights into British children’s use of language.”  “Refreshingly”, it said, “OUP research clearly demonstrates that British children still love reading. Evidence of this is their magpie approach to words famous writers have previously invented.”  

To look up what this means, chose your dictionary carefully.  In the Oxford Junior the magpie is, er, no more.

Every few days in the run-up to Christmas, NATURAL LIGHT will present more words lost from the OJD's world, including some seasonal shockers and many of the most cherished symbols of childhood enriched by nature.

And for last minute shoppers, we'll suggest some books to fill the gap under the tree where the OJD might have gone....  To start with, click the button for books loved by Project Wild Thing - a partnership dedicated to reconnecting kids and their families with the outdoors.

Why not add your recommendations?  

Anna Thorvaldsdóttir works with large sonic structures and a variety of sustained sound materials.  Her inspiration comes from listening deeply to landscapes and nature: in the case of aequlibria that inspiration came from watching the sky.  

aequilibria begins with its feet firmly on the ground, with a tonic drone shared between the bass instruments.  This groundedness is enhanced by the emergence of an occasional major chord from within a hazy texture, but overall the impression is of light, airy and airborne textures in the flute and violins. A slow progression towards a brief but arresting crescendo suggests a distant tectonic rumble.

"I am deeply inspired by nature when writing music.  I do not seek to imitate actual sounds but search for natural proportions and natural movement and flow" says Thorvaldsdóttir.  Her latest album, Aerial, has just been released on Deutsche Grammophon.

In 1894 the Australian Musical Album published "The Bell Bird, composed by Reene Lees who is not yet eleven years old". It is a piano exercise, and suggests she was doing well in her piano studies as well as showing promise as a future composer.

The National Library of Australia holds two other compositions by Reene Lees, but I have been unable to find any further reference to her, or to her music.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) was one of a number of World War II prisoners of war who passed the time in captivity by studying birds.  But whereas John Buxton, Peter Conder and George Waterston went on to publish their detailed observations on the way to illustrious careers as ornithologists, Messiaen’s meticulous note-taking was of the musical kind.


Famously, he finished his ground-breaking Quartet for the End of Time in Stalag VIII-A, Görlitz.  Invoking the songs of blackbirds and nightingales, it was the first major work written in what was to become known as his style oiseau.  In the two decades that followed, he wrote dozens of works that were either explicitly studies in transcribing birdsong, or other works – usually religious – that used material from his extensive collection of birdsong notations he had amassed during regular expeditions into the countryside.



Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux comprises seven books of piano pieces based on birdsong he had transcribed in the field.  These date from the early 1950 and it was not until 1970 that he wrote another significant piano piece based on birdsong, La Fauvette des Jardins - The Garden Warbler.  Although he wrote birdsong-influenced pieces for orchestral and choral forces for the rest of his life, La Fauvette des Jardins was his last major piano work of its kind.

Peter Hill is the foremost pianist/scholar to have specialised in Messiaen, and he has performed and recorded the definitive interpretations of the birdsong pieces.  He has studied Messiaen’s original field notes as well as the finished scores, and, most importantly, the songs of the birds themselves.  In 2012, among Messiaen’s papers Hill discovered what appeared to be several pages of a draft of a previously unknown piano work, dating from the summer of 1961. 

La Fauvette Passerinette -The Subalpine Warbler - was virtually complete: the pencil manuscript indicated it was ready for rewriting as a fair copy, complete with pedalling and fingering indications.  Passerinette seems to have been intended as the start of a new piano cycle.  He would treat birdsong in a very different way to before, with the birdsong generating the harmonies rather than being scored against harmonic backgrounds that evoked the bird’s habitat.

I received an email from Peter Hill announcing his discovery and inviting me to attend that very rare thing:  a Messiaen world premiere, which took place a year ago in Sheffield.  Now the new piece has been recorded and made the top 20 classical albums chart – not bad for modernist music.  It was featured on CD Review at the weekend and can be heard for another 4 weeks by clicking the button.

Andrew Dawes produces of Radio 4's Tweet of the Day - World Birds, the ninety seconds of pure pleasure that many of us wake up to each morning.  It is also the source material for NATURAL LIGHT's Re:Tweet of the Day, exploring the connections between birdsong and the artists it inspires.

Andrew is also a Trustee of the Richard Jefferies Museum Trust. 

It was one of our greatest nature commentators and writers Richard Jefferies (1848 - 1887) who wrote, in what would be one of his last essays, Hours of Spring: “It is sweet on awaking in the early morn to listen to the small bird singing on the tree. No sound of voice or flute is like to the bird.” Jefferies beautifully highlights that which nature writers, and indeed lovers of the great outdoors, have revelled in through the years, an encounter with wildlife, a timeless immersion within a ‘spirit of place’.  Almost 150 years later Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day humbly aims to provide that sweet awakening, in all its forms, for its many listeners around the world.

Where do I begin? Should I choose the most flamboyant birds? The most endangered? The anthropomorphic cute and cuddly, or even the fearsome and scary? Sir David Attenborough expressed at an early stage a willingness to record for the second series in July, which was delightful. However having begun working on the series in mid-May, this meant I had a first recording deadline with Sir David in just 9 weeks.

Luckily I had at my disposal the phenomenal team involved in the first series of Tweet of the Day, winner of the prestigious Broadcasting Guild Award. So we had a producer, writer, researcher and a script editor but as yet, no birds, and no birdsong.

Tweet of the Day planning focussed in on the 120 species I thought merited inclusion. The flamboyant instantly came into mind. Birds which bring wonder and glamour to the natural world; the blue bird of paradise, emperor penguin, blue footed booby, and resplendent quetzal slipped under the wire like ornithological limbo dancers. Others waited patiently in the wings as encore understudies. The New Zealand wrybill, the only bird with a bill curved to the right, or the Galapagos Islands blood sucking vampire finch for example.   I now had the birds, but what of the birdsong?

As the world’s leading wildlife production house, the BBC’s Natural History Unit has been to every corner of the globe. For two weeks I immersed myself in this vast catalogue of natural sound. As an avid birdwatcher being paid to listen to bird song was like manna from heaven. Amazingly though some species I desired were not in the BBC’s back catalogue. Enter stage left the Macaulay Library in America, part of the Cornell Labs of Ornithology. What the BBC didn’t have, Macaulay did. The series had hatched.

We are roughly half way through the episodes. The series still excites me. It is what makes me rise from my bed at 5am most mornings to come into work. One hundred and eighty words, that’s all, roughly 60 seconds of speech. My passion is to let the birdsong breathe, to allow the listener to be transported to that country for a moment, to stop and above all listen. I hope I have achieved this. Certainly looking at the non-broadcast figures Tweet of the Day is now in the top 5 programmes being downloaded from the Radio 4 website across the UK. Worldwide, our listeners are growing steadily, with 150,000 daily subscribers to the audio server SoundCloud.

With just 120 bird species to choose from,  some listeners' favourites will of course be missing, yet I hope we have brought to the radio schedules the best of what the avian world has to offer; the spectacular, the bizarre, the songsters or in some cases those species we are about to lose forever. Above all for each species to warrant inclusion it had to satisfy an ultimate editorial driver – the voice of birds and our relationship with them. Tweet of the Day is about connection which leads to an awakening as to what is all around us. This is what drives my passion for this series.

As the airwaves crackle into life at two minutes to 6 each weekday morning, Tweet of the Day goes part of the way to proclaim that “…No sound of voice or flute is like to the bird”. I’d like to think Richard Jefferies would approve.

Andrew Dawes

Read more "countryside musings from a Northumbrian awake in the midst of a dream in the deep West Country" at Andrew Dawes' blog The Wessex Reiver

Andrew provides some further musings - from Marconi to Kate Bush - in his introduction to NATURAL LIGHT's Re:Tweet of the Day page.  Our next Re:Tweet will be the Bell Miner on 14 November.

Traditional melodies collected from Nordic countries and filtered through the unique sonic imagination of MajiKer – also known as producer, composer and vocalist Matthew Ker – have been released to raise awareness and funds for nature conservation. 


The NORTH Project interprets traditional tunes and calls on the vocal skills of a particularly eclectic range of singers. Layers of harmony, vocal samples and human beatbox combine to evoke and celebrate the natural world.   

MajiKer gleaned folk melodies from Sweden, Iceland and Norway and gave them new English-language lyrics on the theme of nature, to create what he describes as “a compelling love-letter to both the Nordic folk tradition and the environment which gave birth to it”

MajiKer’s collaborators include artists as diverse as Mercury-nominated folk star Sam Lee, acclaimed jazz-soul diva China Moses, female punk choir Gaggle, Swedish singer-songwriter Jennie Abrahamson, and British vocal ensemble juice.

juice’s Kerry Andrew explained how her trio were attracted into the project.  “We were already a fan of MajiKer’s work with French experimental pop singer Camille.  We love how he created his words for Rocks of Ritual – the track we’ve contributed - by listening to the original Swedish lyrics and coming up with new English text that sounded as close to the Swedish as possible, but with a totally new meaning! He also got us to create vocal effects that you'd normally only be able to do in a studio, such as singing the tune whilst detuning over its length until we meet in the middle, which was a fun challenge!”

MajiKer explained his working methods: “each of the melodies was a folk tune from Norway, Sweden or Iceland, introduced to me by someone who had a personal or emotional connection to it.  I tried to capture the sound of the lyrics whilst writing in English.

“All the new lyrics are about the natural world, with each song evoking a different element of nature. I was imagining what these natural features would sing if they could tell us of their past; a sort of folkloric history of the landscape itself.”

Given Majiker’s success as a beatboxer, it is perhaps not surprising that every sound on the album is derived from the human voice. “I sampled guest artists and created electronic instruments of their voices which sat alongside layers of sung harmony and human beatbox – for once not by me, only by the vocalists themselves!”

It took almost four years from the first recording session to the album mastering. “I don't usually spend this long on any one project, but as I uncovered more and more beautiful folk tunes and met new artists with whom I was keen to work on NORTH, the process blossomed and sprawled into unexpected territories.  Piecing together a final tracklist was tricky, but the idea of a journey through the four seasons fitted perfectly.”

At the project's heart is a message about the beauty of nature and a plea to support its conservation.  "So the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle was the decision to work with Naturskyddsföreningen" Majiker says. "They will receive all profits from sales and streaming of the album."

To download or stream the album - click here.