Waking Up
It’s 4.30! Waking up I look out onto a mascara smudged sky riven with pink glow lipstick – the aftermath of last nights storm. Starlings whistle and fizz from the chimney pot. And Sparrows chirp from under the eaves. A song thrush sings ‘Sweetheart’ ‘Sweetheart’ ‘Sweetheart’, or ‘Cherry B’ ‘Cherry B’ ‘Cherry B’ as the sun breaks through. A wren scolds …
….. listening to the goldfinches …; listening to the swallows as they twitter past … the chaffinches ‘chink, chink;’ thrushes, and distant blackbirds in the oaks; ‘cuckoo, cuckoo;’ `crake, crake;’ buzzing and burring of bees, coo of turtle-doves, now and then a neigh to remind you that there are horses, fulness and richness of musical sound; a world of grass and leaf, humming like a hive with voices ….*
waking up
the sounds of the day
waking up
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Create your own (virtual) Dawn Chorus from the playlists. Cue them in at differing times to get the full effect. Perhaps starting with the song thrush which has the longest playing time.
Tip: If you’ve come to this post via my ebook “always sparrows” open both the blog post and the book in separate windows. You can flip between the two and your choice of birdsongs will continue to play. It’s even easier if you have a device which can operate in split screen mode.
punctuating time
a blackbird’s song
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This post is the first in a proposed series of posts in support of my interactive semi-autobiographical ebook of haiku – ‘always sparrows’ – with over 60 haiku, and other Japanese short-form poetry. Please leave a comment, or drop me an email if you’d like a free downloadable copy.
Copyrights
The birdsong recordings are used here under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs4.0 license. These and many more can be found at – Xeno-Canto a website dedicated to sharing bird sounds from all over the world.
* An extract from the nature essays of Richard Jefferies
