Listening Earth Blog

Early spring dawn chorus at Kazdagi, Turkey by Listening Earth

The dawn chorus of birdsong can be an impressive phenomenon – and the European ones through spring and summer come highly recommended by our northern friends. So we’ve been looking forward to experiencing them ourselves in all their noisy glory.

In particular, we’ve been curious whether the boreal dawn chorus has similar dynamics to what we’re familiar with in the southern hemisphere.

Having just spent two mornings in the Kazdagi mountains, we’ve just heard (and recorded) our first European dawn chorus.

(We know – being in Anatolia, we are technically borderline in Asia. But biogeographically, the north west of Turkey is like Europe in most respects, so we’re running with that!)

Our report from the field is that – yes – it has similar characteristics.

Beginning at the first flush of dawn, species join the growing chorus in a recognisable order, culminating in a half hour or more of pure cacophony. Each stops singing by their own timeline, and eventually everything winds down. There is often a quiet lull for another half an hour or so around actual sunrise.

Once birds start feeding and moving around, vocalising picks up again, but is then more spacious and the diurnal repertoire more varied. In terms of listening, this is my preferred time for attempting a good birdsong recording, as a dense dawn chorus can often be quite overwhelming.

This recording is a little from the height of this morning’s proceedings.