"In Search Of Nightingales"

"Yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip, yip." Yipee! That liquid yipping was a male nightingale freshly arrived from Africa. I went to Fishers Green early hoping to hear, see and photograph one. I wandered around their known haunts for a couple of hours and was about to leave when I heard the complex, liquid song complete with yips. I crept to where it was coming from and a brown-backed bird flew across the path into a hawthorn bush. I hung around for a while but couldn't get an image. I met a couple of birder women who come here every year from the East End and they had heard it too.

While I was searching I came across a pretty pond that I hadn't seen before with a little bridge, reeds and a willow tree. I'll be back in a few weeks as it is perfect dragon and damsel hunting territory. My blip is of the reeds.

I did some nightingale research when I got home and found In Search Of Nightingales The Diary Of Elizabeth Campbell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RySwzFBLw4 There's a pic in the film quite like the pond I found. She talks of picking bluebells to take back to London. MrQ tells me that when he was young the Southend Road used to be full of cyclists heading east on a Sunday evening with bunches of bluebells in their saddlebags.

MrQ and I also listened to the original recording of Beatrice Harrison playing her cello in her Surrey cottage garden with a nightingale singing along.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOUb48W1_90  It was one of the first BBC outside broadcasts in May 1924. He recognised the tune as he plays it on his alto sax. He loved to hear Freddy Gardner playing it.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbBqJ4tOsos We both shed tears, Dvorjak's Songs My Mother Taught Me pulls at the heart strings.