| Where memory meets evidence |
| Episode V The Vanishing Chorus What happened to the everyday sounds of nature? |
| Some of my strongest memories of the natural world are not really visual memories at all. They are sounds. I spent much of my childhood in Australia and Malaysia, and from a very young age I became accustomed to living against a remarkably energetic natural backdrop. In Malaysia, particularly, where jungle bordered the area where we lived, the world beyond the house was rarely silent. There were birds, insects and primates, cicadas and katydids, squirrels moving through the vegetation and the unmistakable commotion of wild boar. There were barks, hoots, grunts, whoops, squeals and noises for which a small child probably had no name at all. Geckos scattered across walls and, after dark, there could be the altogether less welcome whine of mosquitoes beyond the netting. It was not some idyllic soundtrack that I appreciated every moment of the day. Nature can be extremely irritating when there is enough of it. Australia had its bloody flies. Malaysia had mosquitoes, accompanied by the knowledge that malaria was not an abstract tropical disease but something that could and did kill people. Britain had midges. There is a danger when looking backwards that we turn the wildlife of childhood into something resembling a Disney film. It wasn’t. Sometimes it bit you, stung you, woke you up or drove you mad. But it was there, and that is the important part. By the time I returned to Britain in 1977, I was already accustomed to listening to wildlife. Britain sounded different from Australia and Malaysia. It seemed quieter and, strangely, more restrained, but it certainly wasn’t silent. There were birds in the mornings, foxes calling at night, owls, frogs, insects and the shrill calls of shrews. It was simply another chorus performed by another collection of animals. Somewhere along the way, however, I think that chorus became quieter. I cannot give you a particular Tuesday morning when it happened. There was no moment when I opened the back door and announced that nature had disappeared. The change became noticeable from around the early 2000s and has accelerated more recently. That is memory speaking, of course, and as I explored in the previous episode, memory needs evidence. When the evidence is examined, however, it becomes difficult to dismiss the broader impression simply as nostalgia. Britain’s wildlife has really undergone substantial changes during the period of my lifetime. Long-running monitoring shows major declines across many groups since the 1970s, although the picture is complicated. Some species have declined dramatically, others have remained relatively stable, and some have increased or expanded their ranges. That complication matters because The Vanishing Chorus should not become a story in which everything was abundant in 1977 and everything is disappearing in 2026. Nature doesn’t work like that. Take birds. I remember thrushes, cuckoos and nightingales as part of the British soundscape, but their stories are not identical. Song Thrush numbers fell heavily from the late 1960s, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s, although there have since been periods of recovery. Nightingales have suffered a considerable contraction of their range in Britain and are now concentrated largely in southern and eastern England. Other birds have followed entirely different trajectories. The orchestra hasn’t simply become smaller; some of its musicians have changed places while others have become much harder to hear. Perhaps the creature that brought this home to me most unexpectedly was the shrew. I was talking to somebody of roughly my own age recently when I suddenly asked, “Where have the shrews gone?” As children, we heard them. Their extraordinarily high-pitched calls were simply part of summer. I hadn’t spent the intervening decades consciously keeping a mental register marked “shrew noises”. One day, I became aware that a sound I associated with summer seemed to be missing. That is one of the difficulties with environmental change. We tend to notice arrival much more readily than disappearance. If an unusual bird lands in the garden tomorrow morning, we may photograph it, identify it and tell somebody about it. If a bird that has visited the garden every morning for twenty years gradually stops coming, how long does it take before anybody notices? That same question can be asked about countless creatures that were once sufficiently ordinary that nobody thought to record every encounter with them. The same applies to insects. One of the most frequently discussed memories among people of my generation is the number of insects that once ended up on cars. I remember it too. After journeys, the front of a car could be covered with them. It wasn’t something confined to one childhood country either; I remember insect abundance around cars in Australia, Malaysia and Britain. Today the phenomenon has become sufficiently noticeable by its absence that researchers and citizen scientists actually use vehicle journeys to monitor flying insects. That does not mean every recollection of an insect-covered windscreen constitutes scientific evidence, but when thousands of people independently remember something similar and modern monitoring detects substantial changes in insect populations and distributions, the memory warrants investigation rather than dismissal. Insects matter to the chorus even when we cannot hear them. They pollinate plants, consume other organisms, break down material and become food for birds, mammals, amphibians and one another. Remove enough of them, and the effects travel through the garden. A quieter evening around the outside light may seem insignificant until we remember how many other creatures depended upon what once flew around it. This is where professional gardening has given me another way of listening. Across the many gardens we encounter, the differences can be remarkable. Some gardens feel energetic. There is movement in the hedges, insects working through flowers, birds passing between shrubs and activity at ground level. Others can be immaculately maintained and strangely lifeless. Size is not necessarily the deciding factor either. A small garden with sufficient planting density, shelter, food, water and places to hide can contain an extraordinary amount of life. In contrast, a much larger garden managed under rigid ornamental control can contain comparatively little. That presents an interesting problem when you earn your living maintaining gardens. Clients quite reasonably employ us because they want their gardens looked after. They don’t necessarily want to pay a gardener to arrive, admire the weeds and go home declaring them valuable habitat. Equally, maintaining a garden does not require removing every fallen leaf, cutting every plant to the ground, eliminating every untidy corner or turning every square metre into something neat enough to be inspected with a ruler. The answer is usually compromise. We can maintain the garden while allowing parts of it to breathe. A hedge can remain useful to wildlife without looking neglected. Seed heads can sometimes stay. A corner can be allowed to become slightly wild. Dead wood can have a purpose. Ponds, dense planting and ground cover can provide opportunities that immaculate expanses of hard landscaping cannot. One of the most damaging ideas in gardening has been the assumption that tidy automatically means healthy. It doesn’t. Sometimes tidy means empty. I see the opposite when wildlife is allowed to return. At our own allotment, the construction of a dead hedge has already changed the amount of wildlife using the site. I have seen similar effects in wildlife-friendly gardens and in places where habitat is deliberately encouraged rather than continually controlled. Give nature food, shelter and somewhere relatively undisturbed to live and the response can sometimes be surprisingly quick. That gives me hope, because not everything I am observing is decline. I am seeing hornets and wasps behaving differently in our changing climate, with the European hornet becoming increasingly noticeable in areas where I work. Bees are appearing at times of year when older gardening calendars might have suggested otherwise. Foxes have adapted remarkably well to urban life. Hedgehogs and birds have also adjusted aspects of their behaviour around human settlements. Climate, urbanisation, gardens and human behaviour are not simply reducing wildlife; they are changing the opportunities available to it. Some species lose from those changes. Others exploit them. Nature adapts whenever it can. The problem arises when we remove too many choices. I was asked whether the natural world might seem quieter because I am older. Of course that possibility has to be considered. Childhood is a peculiar measuring instrument. Summers can seem enormous, places appear larger and experiences become attached to emotions in ways we may not fully understand until decades later. My childhood was also unusual because it crossed three very different natural environments: Australia, Malaysia and Britain. It would be absurd to expect a Kent garden to reproduce the soundscape of tropical Malaysia. But that doesn’t mean every comparison is imaginary. This is precisely why observation and evidence have to accompany memory. Britain’s long-term wildlife records show that substantial changes have occurred. The precise causes differ between species and habitats, but land use, habitat loss and fragmentation, agricultural practices, pollution, development, and climate change all contribute to a complex story. We have altered the landscape, and the landscape’s inhabitants have responded. Gardens form part of that landscape too. Individually they can appear insignificant. Collectively they are an enormous network of potential habitats running through towns, villages and cities. What happens inside them therefore matters. One household removes a hedge. Another replaces a lawn with artificial grass. Somebody else fills in a pond. A neighbour removes an old tree. None of those decisions appears capable of changing Britain’s wildlife, but nature experiences landscapes differently from us. To a hedgehog, bird, moth, beetle or bee, our property boundaries mean nothing. Gardens are connected territories. Remove enough shelter, water, food and nesting places, and eventually those territories become harder to cross. Restore them and something equally interesting can happen: life finds its way back. That is why I don’t believe the vanishing chorus has necessarily vanished forever. I think we can make room for it. I have considerable faith in people, even though occasionally we give one another plenty of reasons to question that faith. Environmental awareness is growing because the changes around us are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. More garden owners are questioning rigid ornamental gardening. More are thinking about pollinators, ponds, hedges, water, native plants, dead wood and the value of leaving something alone. If I persuaded every garden owner to do one thing, it would be remarkably simple: allow somewhere to become untidy. Not the whole garden, just somewhere. Give nature a corner in which human expectations are not quite so important, then watch and listen. That last part matters to me. I have always been an observer, but observation is not confined to what we see. Sometimes good observation means standing in a garden and recognising what we cannot hear. It means listening without pretending that something is there. There have been mornings and evenings when I have stood in gardens and noticed precisely that. Nothing dramatic has happened. There is simply less going on than instinct tells me there should be. A quiet garden can be beautiful, but a garden emptied of natural sound feels different. To me, a quiet garden is an empty garden. Perhaps that feeling comes from the places in which I grew up. Cicadas became such a familiar background sound that I could fall asleep listening to them. Many years later, when Suze and I lived on the Isle of Wight, we rented a property behind a large warehouse that produced a continuous hum through the night. Suze found it difficult to sleep. I found it soothing. Even now, living on a busy street, I prefer sleeping with the window open because I like hearing the world outside. Maybe somewhere in my mind I am still that child listening to the chorus beyond the house. I was also asked to choose one wildlife encounter from my life that I felt particularly fortunate to have witnessed. I couldn’t. At sixty-three, I don’t consider myself old, although I am certainly not as young as I once was. I have lived in different countries, travelled widely and encountered enough animals, birds, insects and landscapes to know how fortunate I have been. My life has been filled with curiosity, wonder and fascination with the natural world. Choosing one encounter would somehow miss the point. It was never one animal. It was all of them: the cicadas, the birds, the frogs, the insects, the shrews, the owls, the animals moving beyond the garden and the thousands of creatures I noticed without ever learning their names. Together they created the chorus. That may be what concerns me most about wildlife decline. Extinction rightly attracts attention because it is final. Yet long before a species disappears completely, something else can disappear first: abundance. The ordinary. The moment when something becomes sufficiently uncommon that seeing or hearing it becomes an event. We don’t always notice nature disappearing as it happens. Sometimes we notice only when the sound has stopped, and by then it may already be very late. But not necessarily too late, because I have also watched what happens when we give nature somewhere to return to. Sometimes the hedge moves again. Sometimes something rustles beneath the dead wood. Sometimes the insects return to the flowers. And sometimes, if we are patient enough to stand still and listen, the garden begins finding its voice again. |
| About our writing & imagery Most articles are grounded in our real gardening experience, observations and reflections. AI may assist with research, drafting and editing, but the experiences, opinions and editorial direction are our own. Featured images may include our photography, original AI-generated visuals or, where stated, images credited to others. All published content is reviewed and shaped by Earthly Comforts before publication. |
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