Night Sounds: Birds in Suffolk, Hedgehogs in Lincolnshire

It’s almost three in the morning, and I stand at the edge of one of the most remarkable places in Cambridgeshire. Part of the fertile East Anglian farmlands, Cambridgeshire is flat and intensely agricultural. There are certainly interesting places here: Wicken Fen, the National Trust’s first nature reserve, donated by Charles Rothschild, is one of them; and the late Oliver Rackham studied the ancient woodland fragments around Cambridge itself, which hold huge populations of the true oxlip – a plant that is found only on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk borders.

Like all woodlands here, the one I stand before is small. At barely five hectares, it has been dug and ripped at the seams to create profitable wheat fields. The remnants of a wood bank lie to the south, one of the few indications that once it was a much larger working ancient wood.

I took up night walking as a teenage misanthrope not far from here, in the similarly arable landscape of West Suffolk, keen to explore the world without light or people. Night sounds provided a background to my thoughts; in and of themselves they meant little to me. I couldn’t tell, then, whether a particular grunt was badger or hedgehog. I simply needed to escape. Now, however, after years of practice, I know what’s around me. Voles and field mice tunnel through the long grass at the wood’s edge, making occasional combative squeaks. From far off, near the village, a female fox calls. Further still can be heard the motorway, a constant, rushing noise.

The wood itself is a repository of sound, a subtle orchestra of crackling, snapping, and rustling. Wind plays on the leaves.

And then I hear what I am waiting for. The wood’s own flute. The nightingale.

I walk towards it.

*

Several years ago, the summer I left university, I was briefly employed as a field assistant for a friend’s PhD. Titled The value of agri-environment schemes for macro-invertebrate feeders: hedgehogs on arable farms in Britain, the job involved spending two weeks in another East Anglian landscape: the wide, open fields just north of King’s Lynn. This area, on the Lincolnshire-Norfolk border, is a strange place. Farms stretch out to that curiously-shaped rump which forms the Wash. It is a depopulated area, and one of the cheapest rural places to live: you can still buy a three-bedroom house here for £60,000.

Each night, at around 9pm, we drove to the study area around a village called Gedney Drove End. The name seems to perfectly conjure the feeling of this place: it is an edge, a place nobody comes for holidays, slowly being carved out by the sea, and its rural inhabitants are leaving. It reminds me of Caithness, in northern Scotland – another vast, flat landscape.

And here, until the pre-dawn, we tracked hedgehogs.

There were four of us, but we worked alone, each assigned to a quadrant of several fields. The hedgehogs had been found a few weeks before, and a radio-transmitter was attached to each (a process of gluing the tiny transmitter, with its serial number, to a hedgehog’s back), along with a small red light. We set off on our own, with our receivers, our maps, and our headlights, and we recorded, once per hour, the location of all the hedgehogs we could find.

They turned out to be predictable beasts, sticking to the same route each night, which traced the edges of the fields, where the margins had been left. This particular area benefited from an agri-environment scheme in which the field edges were left wild, so that long grass and nettles, aided by fertiliser run-off, dominated. The headlight cast a flat white light over an area not much larger than a couple of square metres. Copses and lone trees stood as darker shapes against the sky, which was not quite black.

From somewhere in the brambles a snuffle and shuffle.

I stop, hold my receiver high, sweep it around, and listen for the stronger beep-beep-beep that signals the hedgehog. Mark a cross on the map, and walk on.

Uniquely, we have been given access to the entire farm. Nowhere is out-of-bounds. When I was younger, and first started to leave my bedroom in the early hours, it didn’t occur to me to stray from the paths. I suppose I imagined even at that hour there would be an angry farmer ready to chase me through the barley. But here I was alone and free. How strange, and delicious, to be solitary in the night. To be given the gift of free roaming. In the free time between each route I ran across stubbled fields. I turned off my light, and crept through small oak and ash woods. A devilish excitement held me: I could do anything and not be seen, for there was nobody around, except my three colleagues, for miles.

For the most part, however, I was content to wander, and to listen. I began to distinguish sounds: there was the barn owl with its sudden and horrific screech, and the softer, gentler tawny owl. Horses blew their lips. The hedgehogs themselves were often surprisingly loud – especially when mating.

But there were subtler sounds, too. The difference between wheat and oilseed rape in a breeze. The rattling of loose silver birch bark. Claws against oak. My own feet tearing grass, docks, nettles and willowherb, and then scuffing against the baked, ridged track made by a combine years before.

*

An eruption of pigeons startles me. The comical whistling of their wings as they fly up en masse is somehow more sinister in the dark.

The nightingale’s song, one of nature’s most revered and inspirational sounds, is my only guide. I have no torch, no phone light; and the Moon is waning and covered by scudding, fibrous clouds. I do not know this wood at all – my friend, a far better naturalist than I, and the chief executive of the local Wildlife Trust – told me that nightingales occupy the gravel pits and willow scrub which are dotted around the county, and that this is one of the places they settle in during the Spring.

It is hard to describe the song without resorting to cliché. Beethoven and Wordsworth knew that it was liquid, that it spoke to the soul, pouring in through the ears. There is something fluid about it, but there is something very robin- or thrush-like, too (unsurprising, since it’s a close relative) and that makes it not otherworldly, but more familiar than I had expected. Still, I can’t help thinking of dryads and wood elves. It feels very Tolkien-esque here.

Like most birds, nightingales prefer messy places. Restricted to dense young-growth habitats, they favour blackthorn and willow scrub, which are relatively rare environments in this increasingly tidy, homogenous landscape. They sing from the dense tangled heart of the wood, and I know that no matter how close I get, I will not see one. Rather, it will seem as though the wood itself is singing.

Once my eyes have adjusted, and I can just make out the path before me, I start walking. My world is small, even smaller than it was with my headlight, when I sought hedgehogs.

I should not be here. This wood is privately owned, and in danger of being grubbed out, but I feel some of that night-recklessness that I did in Lincolnshire. I know that I am alone, that no gamekeeper is going to point his rifle at me through a gap in the trees. This wood is small and unlovely, and few people know it exists.

The song is, in some ways, like a radio transmission. It seems to come from everywhere. I turn a circle, slowly, but my ears are not very good receivers. At a certain point I pause. A second song starts up, quietly, as though its singer is practising for the real performance. This second melody runs into the first, strengthening it, acting as an amplifier. Two flutes in an orchestra, or a confluence of two small brooks.

I leave the relative safety of the path and find a gap in the thorns. My eyes feel pressed, as if they want to retreat further into my skull. The trees are close, and the noise I make as I sweep aside branches and leaves silences the rest of the wood, which makes it seem, more than ever, that I am shrinking into an ever smaller, but watched, space. It is strange to think that the wood is so small. The song, which has a cathedral-like resonance, makes it seem much grander.

It grows stronger.

I step out into a small clearing by a row of long-ago coppiced hazel. Behind them is an impenetrable thicket of blackthorn and hawthorn. I can go no further. I am as close to the nightingale as I will ever be.

For a moment I fear the song has finished, but, suddenly, eerily close, it begins again. On my other side, in another thicket, the second joins it.

I stand, and then sit, and then lie next to a log. Inside the log, no doubt, dozens of saprophytic insects are going about their business. Above me is the sky, starless.

All around me, the wood is singing.

An abridged and edited version appears in EarthLines Magazine, issue 12.