Environment and nature

Woman: People assume the hard part of my job is the early starts, or the cold, or sitting motionless in a hide for five hours at a stretch. It isn't. The hard part is finding silence to put the birds into. When I began, twenty-odd years ago, I could walk half a mile into Holloway Wood and get a clean hour of dawn chorus. Now there's a flight path overhead and a distribution depot on the ridge, and a clean minute is a small triumph. Woman: I used to edit the intrusions out, frankly, and I'm not especially proud of that. What changed my mind was a researcher who asked for my raw files. She wasn't interested in the pretty recordings at all; she wanted to hear whether the wrens were shifting their song into the gaps between planes. So these days I leave the lorries in. Some listeners write in to say it spoils the atmosphere, and I do sympathise, but I'd rather give them a true picture than a comforting one. A recording of a wood that no longer exists isn't nature broadcasting. It's nostalgia.