There are 5,500 breeding pairs left in the UK. They arrive along the coastal woodland of Kent and East Anglia. I walk over the Bypass-to-Be past the ravaged line of tree stumps round the rewilded field to the woodland where the nightingale sings at dusk and in the day. I clutch my Merlin app and record dunnocks, ceti’s warblers but the best of all was the early song thrush in April just as Sizewell C began their tree felling, forerunner to the nightingale.
The nightingale sang in that wood in Chaucer’s day, in Jane Austen’s day, features in Shakespeare, Keats, Wilde. I don’t think it will be here next year. Theberton Bypass threatens the Theberton nightingale. SeaLink cables will disturb the Leiston nightingales down Goldings Lane, the Aldringham ones in Fitches Lane and those along the old Railway Line in Aldeburgh. I don’t know about Thorpeness and Scottish Power, Friston and the Wembley sized substation over a farmer’s whole land and the three converters at Saxmundham.
What price are we paying turning the peace and beauty and nature and farmland of Suffolk into a profit-making Energy Hub for corporates?
I would rather have a living nightingale than an Instagram recording of their song.
ness365 