Singing with nightingales

As the sun sets over a Sussex woodland, folk singer Sam Lee leads a small group of curious people to listen to the rare and beautiful song of the nightingale

- Tanya Jackson

The silence is palpable. We sit motionless in the dark, goosebumps on our arms, listening intently to every rustle, creak and far-off snap of twig, waiting for a tweet, a call, anything that will tell us there is a nightingale somewhere in the vicinity. Like many in this little group, it will be the first time I have ever heard one. I can hardly dare breathe for fear of scaring it off.

It's a chilly May night in Sussex, and I'm one of 15 people who have just walked half a mile through pitch-black countryside to sit on the prickly edge of a stubble field in the hope of hearing their first nightingale. But we're not just here for the birds- we're in the company of musicians who, almost unbelievably, are planning a real-life symphony with them, featuring human voices, a violin, and an instrument called a shruti box.

However, like any diva worth its salt, the nightingale is making us wait. Three metres away, a soft note from a violin slowly rises through the air, lilting and growing to a dramatic crescendo. It's my favourite kind of fiddle playing-crystal clear like the Slavic gypsy style, achingly beautiful and still with you long after it ends. To my surprise, this is followed by the full-bellied, unnuanced drone of the shruti box. But singer and author Sam Lee is an authority on both folk music and nightingales, and knows exactly what he's doing.

The hedgerow, however, remains silent. Sam begins to sing unaccompanied and I listen with a twinge of sadness. Nightingales have been all but wiped out in the UK, with a 90% population decline in the past 50 years. With rising temperatures in their winter home of north-west Africa affecting their food supplies, and their scrubland habitat being gradually erased from the British landscape, it seems inevitable that nightingales will become extinct here. The quieter they are tonight, the more heartbreaking this feels.