The sound of spring

Carla Passino follows chirruping birds, croaking frogs and rushing waterfalls to enjoy the new season across Europe

- Carla Passino

AS the days get longer and a tapestry of trembling new leaves and fragile blooms clothes meadows, trees and bushes, Nature’s orchestra begins to play with gusto. There are many places in Europe where you can hear the world reawakening, but here are seven European favourites.

Best for the all-day chorus

Extremadura, Spain

Each spring, dulcet trilling, warbling crescendos, melancholic singing and every sound in between fill the plains and crags of Extremadura, one of Europe’s birdwatching hotspots. ‘The combination of birdsong with the glory of wildflowers is like stepping back in time to springtime as it used to be across western Europe,’ says Martin Kelsey, who, with his wife, Claudia, and their son, Patrick, runs Birding Extremadura (www.birding extremadura.com).

The region, he explains, has an astonishing variety of landscapes, each of which has its own spring soundscape. ‘Rural gardens, orchards and woods flow with the rich sound of nightingales; bee-eaters give their short, rolling flight calls. The plains erupt with lark song, especially that of the robust Calandra lark, singing without a pause in the sky-high above, capturing in perfect mimicry the sound of other birds.

‘Around villages, you hear the cheerful and conversational chatter of red rumped swallows and the zany whistles of spotless starlings. White storks clack their bills like castanets in greeting and, in the evening, above the town square and along the narrow streets, swifts scream in tight, manic flocks.’

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