Bon Voyage!

IMAGINE you're going to go on a 6000 mile journey. You'll be away for eight months. You'll be on the move most of the time.

What preparations will you make? What will you take?


I know I'd want to find out a lot about where I was going. About the terrain; the climate; will they have Costa Coffee? At the very least I'd want a map. But a good satellite navigation system would be better.


Well, if you're a bird, there's not a lot by way of preparation you can do, except to eat well and keep those wing muscles exercised. There's no way for you to do any research. There's nothing you can take. You just have to trust that your inbuilt sat nav is going to get you to where you need to be - and back - at the right time.


5 billion small songbirds - from swallows to willow warblers - engage in an exodus from Europe into Africa each Autumn. Tagging with leg rings has told us something about their movements in Europe, but where they go in Africa is still largely a mystery.


That's why, in Thetford (Norfolk, England), right now, there are some very excited conservationists. Because electronics has got ever smaller, for the first time they have been able to track the migration of a songbird. Not just any songbird, but possibly the most written about, sung about, celebrated songbird of all time.

(Photo by Edmund Fellowes/BTO)

They have tracked the amazing journey of a nightingale, code named "OAD", all the way from Norfolk to Guinea-Bissau in North Africa.  That's a hell of a long way for a bird about the size of a robin.  The tiny geolocator is too small to 'send' information, so they had to re-catch the birds they'd tagged. They caught OAD just 50 yards from where they tagged him last year. Information from the logger has shown his incredible journey from July until February.

here's a map of the route

The English Channel and France were really just a warm up for what was ahead.

OAD had to negotiate the Pyrenees, like a great wall dividing France from Spain, prone to sudden, heavy thunderstorms.


In August Spain is hot and arid. Songbirds tend to migrate in the dark to avoid the heat and evade predators. But an unexpected horror waits for them in the Spanish night. One that they can't see or hear. The greater noctule bat, with its 45cm wingspan, has recently been proven to catch and eat songbirds, on the wing, during migration, especially in the Autumn.


Once he had escaped the bats, OAD probably had to run the gauntlet of the Strait of Gibraltar, where many birds of prey would also be heading south.


In Morocco he had a three week rest to refuel. The satellite pictures show that there's a bit of green in the North and if he hugged the coastline he could avoid the mountains, but further south it looks grimly brown. Then he would be into Western Sahara, Mauritania and northern Senegal, which all look equally barren.


All down that west coast there is the risk of vast, swirling dust storms being blown across from the Sahara - so furious they can strike as far out as the Canary Islands.


OAD had just six weeks or so in Guinea-Bissau before beginning that awesome endeavour in reverse. The logger stopped recording in February so we don't know his route back, but the scientists hope to log more birds next year.

The nightingale is a sleek little bird a bit longer than a robin, with huge beautiful eyes. It's brown down the back and pale in front and has an upright stance reminiscent of a thrush.

more pix like this


Like other songbirds, the males sing during the day, especially at dawn. Of course, what has placed the nightingale into legend, poetry and song is the pure, passionate, haunting beauty of its singing at night, when all else is still.

a nightingale singing
3 nightingales competing


I formed my early impressions of how beautiful a nightingale must sound from Nat King Cole's rendition of 'A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square'. I almost imagined that the bird would sound like him.

I wish I'd thought to seek one out as a child. There were 10 times as many nightingales in the 60s as there are today.

Sadly, nightingale numbers in England are in free-fall. They're increasingly rare, but are clinging on in East Anglia and the South East.


I started out wanting to convey the awesome nature of a songbird's migration, but in the process I've uncovered yet another conservation emergency. I guess these days that's almost inevitable. If anyone is inspired to find out more, I recommend the website of the British Trust for Ornithology. They are the guys in Thetford carrying out the research into songbird migration.


These lightweight little creatures spend more than half of their time travelling between their summer and winter destinations. They only live for two or three years. What an immense effort in a short life.


I feel humbled to think that, after all that, they still are able to gift such beauty into the world through their songs.