SPRING 2025 NEWS

A new and fully revised edition of this widely acclaimed reflection on the nightingale and its place in human culture is published by Aurum Press on April 10 .

"It's early May, a nightingale moon. I'm perched in a narrow lane above the Stour valley in Suffolk, listening to the birds. The landscape is already drained of colour, caught in that moment between light and dark when distances and outlines blur. I try to focus on the tumulus of scrub in front of me, but it seems to be dancing and flashing with phosphorescence. I know this is just my eyes playing tricks, but it gives the undergrowth an oddly insubstantial feel, quite out of keeping with the brilliant clarity of the song that is pouring from it…." (from Whistling,1993)

It's become an annual ritual, this pilgrimage to the Suffolk in May to listen to the nightingales. It’s a more poignant expedition each year. The birds always sing, but in smaller numbers, and in increasingly poor spring weather their songs can seem thinner and more hesitant. And to all of us who are aware of their declining numbers across Europe, they can sound like elegies. These pilgrimages have become a marker of time in both our lives and the birds'.

It feels like an apt moment to issue a new edition of the book I wrote in the 1990s about the spell that the nightingale's song has cast over humans for two millennia. It seems implausible, the way these piercing, unsettling arias – more than those of any other species of bird – have captivated listeners, from Ovid and Provencal troubadours to Romantic poets and the first birdsong recordists. Is it just a consequence of a long accumulated celebrity status? Or something intrinsic in the complex, oratorical performance that touches a deep chord in our understanding of what pure voice is, and can do?

These questions have risen again in the sense of loss the birds decline has prompted. Listeners nightwalk, hold vigils, play music and sing in nightingale-haunted woods, just as they did in the early 20th century. And, as then, there are new debates about what “music” is and whether it can be credited to a bird.

In this new edition I've aired my own thoughts on these questions, inspired by new listenings at home and abroad, and by discussions with biologists, some of whom are beginning to accept that there is more to a bird's singing than defending territory and attracting a mate – even if it is just satisfying its own pleasure centres. Alongside this we have the bird's rich and tangled cultural history – so revealing of our changing attitudes towards nature – through which I've tried to crawl something like the poet John Clare as he stalked this mysterious, elusive creature: "Like a very boy/Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorns/to find her nest… All seemed as hidden as a thought unborn."

Praise for Whistling in the Dark

" A pure pleasure to read. It stimulates, nudges, tells stories, argues and gleefully offends.. I cannot remember liking a book about nature as much as this for years.. It is a small classic."
Peter Levi, Spectator

"What he accomplishes is exquisite and illuminating , itself a sort of nightingale song, variously throttling back for a sub-theme, then ingeniously improvising or swelling to full measure."
Euan Dunn, Countryman

"A book so delightful I must share it. It is poetry and prose, natural history, memoir, myth and music…and is full of the same darting rhythms as that mysterious bird."
Simon Jenkins, The Times

"Mabey's engaging book quests through fact, fantasy, zoological data…the contents move , inform and reward."
Naomi Lewis, Observer

"Mabey is one of our best nature writers and he has produced a book as enlightening as it is uplifting. ..he has come up with some extraordinary accounts of the nightingale's power to enchant."
John Prston, Sunday Telegraph

This Natural Life. My Radio 4 conversation with Martha Kearney, recorded on our boat on the Norfolk Broads, is available on BBC Sounds for the remainder of 2025.

This Natural Life: Richard Mabey

The Accidental Garden: Gardens, Wilderness and the Space In Between

Shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Award

"This is the elder statesman of nature writing whose books have led to a wellspring of environmental literature that is able to be at once intimate, investigative, scientific and beautiful. As he rummages around this pocket of nature that has come under his charge, Mabey constantly but calmly telegraphs the wider and wilder themes playing out beyond the boundary. The writing style – silky, flab-free, bright – remains irresistible throughout".
Irish Idependent

UK paperback to be published by Profile in June

US edition to be published by New York Review Books in July