It’s been a while since a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. To hear one in Britain these days, unless you’re very fortunate, you will need to go online. Or, like David Attenborough in Attenborough’s Wonder of Song (BBC One), you could play a 1924 recording of the cellist Beatrice Harrison playing in her Surrey garden to the accompaniment of a nearby nightingale’s song.
Attenborough first heard that recording as a child, and was enchanted. He played it here in a programme that found him introducing some of his favourite recordings from the natural world.
What would the BBC do without David Attenborough? It’s a question that surely keeps them up at night. He remains the voice of landmark natural history series but is also on hand to fill the schedules with one-offs such as this and last week’s programme on mammoths, which rely less on spectacular cinematography and instead lean on his erudition.
This wasn’t a greatest hits of Attenborough’s career, but he did revisit clips from past programmes. They included an astonishing piece of footage featuring the Australian lyrebird. This bird had such a talent for mimicry that it could imitate a camera shutter, a car alarm and a chainsaw.
Male lyrebirds can also use this talent for rather sneaky ends. They will imitate a group of birds reacting to the presence of a predator, creating a fake scare to persuade females to come close to them for protection. Gendered behaviour was one of the themes here. It used to be thought that only male birds sang; in fact, the females sing in 64 per cent of songbird species. Why the wrong thinking in decades past? Because the majority of scientists were men, it was suggested here.
The saddest sound here? The Hawaiian o’o bird calling for a mate, unaware that it was the last of its kind (it was declared extinct in 2000). The most awe-inspiring? The song of the humpback whale. It was hauntingly beautiful, but if you’ve ever wondered what it would sound like up close, take the word of the biologist who first recorded their song: “As if something has put its hand on your chest and is shaking you until your teeth rattle.
