I am camped high up among the crumbling volcanic peaks of the Isle of Rum, in the Inner Hebrides, sheltering in my tent from dense clouds of the hungriest midges I have ever encountered.
- The UK's most beautiful winter walks
- Big Garden Birdwatch 2026: when it is, how to take part and birds to spot
As darkness falls, the fur of midges covering my tent begins to disperse a little, and I venture out still higher, find a spot to sit, and wait.
There is total silence; the mountains seem utterly lifeless. There is no moon and the darkness is almost total.
For a long time nothing happens and I start to worry that I have come to the wrong place, or that I have left it too late in the season. But then I think I hear something far off and faint, at the very limits of my hearing.
And a moment later they are all around me, whooshing past my head, invisible in the dark, and calling four quickfire calls. The dark mountain suddenly turns from tranquillity to tumult. Manx shearwaters are flying in in their thousands.
They nest in burrows high in these hills and only come ashore at nighttime, after a day of fishing possibly a hundred miles out at sea. The colony on this Scottish island is home to perhaps a hundred thousand pairs, a third of the entire world population.
There is layer upon layer of sound; those nearby ring out pure and clear, while beyond them is a constant chatter like a room full of people at a party all talking at once. And beyond even that is a wave of muttering, as if the entire mountain has come to life.
It is an overwhelming experience – individually, their calls may sound harsh and discordant, but as one they sound to me like a choir of angels. This is the final species I have sought out this year, creatures I really want to hear while I still can.
Hearing the sounds of nature
When I walk in the woods, I can no longer hear the birds singing. Perhaps with my hearing aids turned up to their highest, I will hear a few little stabs of sound, just a shadow of what must truly be there.
My hearing has always been an issue for me; childhood illnesses left me profoundly deaf in one ear and hard of hearing in the other and, on reflection, this has shaped many of the choices I have made in life.
I always preferred to socialise on a one-to-one basis, where I could reinforce my limited hearing with a little light lip-reading. Group activities, from school to many working environments to social gatherings, always quickly drained me of energy due to the intense effort of having to try to keep up with everything that was going on around me.
Starting early in my childhood, I found my relief by embarking on solitary walks out in the woods and fields near my home, or from watching the birds on the nearby marshes. The natural world invites your attention, without ever demanding it.
That sense of nature being restorative, of it being the place where I am most at ease, and most my true self, has remained with me throughout my life. But as I have grown older, I have found that my hearing has continued to deteriorate further, at an alarming pace. This progressive hearing loss affects both high and low notes, as if I am retreating to a vanishing point somewhere in the middle of my limited range.
- Crucifying, stabbing, pillaging... These brutal hunting methods used by British birds show nature at its fiercest
- BBC Winterwatch 2026 will have a new location in Northern Ireland that's “teeming with wildlife”
Every season I find that something I could hear last year is now no longer with me, as if it has simply winked out of existence.
I have had a lifetime’s practice at finding workarounds, both practical and psychological; I had convinced myself that appreciation of the natural world was overwhelmingly a visual matter, that sound was an occasional insignificant extra that added little to the experience, and that my steady descent into silence would be no great loss, in the greater scheme of things.
I am relentlessly positive by nature, and it has always been my inclination to see things, even the challenges I face, in the best possible light.
All this changed one winter’s day on the shore near my home in the Western Highlands of Scotland. It was the calmest of days, windless and clear, and the still waters reflected the snow-capped mountains across the loch.
I sat on a rock to watch great northern divers busily fishing and preening. These elegant birds come here every winter from their nesting grounds in Iceland, and I often find myself walking the shore and sitting with them for a while.
But this day would be different, for it was then that I heard for the first time their incredible, otherworldly wail that is the stuff of legends. It felt like the most extraordinary sound I had ever heard in my life, and it shook me to the core. It forced me to acknowledge that not all was lost; not all birds are songbirds, and not all calls are song.
A journey into sound
There were still some remarkable sounds of nature that I might just be able to hear – if not for much longer – if I only made the effort to track them down, and was able to find myself close enough to overcome my limitations.
- Dracula, The Hobbit, Wuthering Heights: landscapes that inspired literary masterpieces by the UK’s most beloved authors
- Where is H is for Hawk filmed? All the locations used in the movie based on Helen Macdonald’s memoir
The moment I had this realisation, it began to feel like an imperative, an act of resistance. I would not go quietly into that good night; rather, I would go down fighting. It seemed like a matter of some urgency, something that I had to do right away, for who knew if these sounds would still be accessible to me if I was to put things off for another year?
And so began my season of sound. I put together a wish list, mostly but not exclusively of birds. It was not so much a list of species as a list of specific calls that are celebrated or even notorious.
They had to be sounds that I had never heard before, and the reason I had never heard them was usually because the animals that produced them were rare and elusive or lived in the most out-of-the-way places.
Songbirds were off the list, as it was too late for them; I was thinking more of the big stuff – shorebirds and seabirds and gamebirds such as greenshank, snipe and whimbrel, Manx shearwater, puffin and storm petrel, divers and grebes and bittern, black grouse and corncrake and ptarmigan.
I added to these the nighttime chorus of the natterjack toad and the whistling of the otter, which I would only hear if I was able to get unfeasibly close. Many of the calls I was after were specific to a short breeding season, so I would have to not just make my way to the right place, but be there at the right moment in time.
I began to pore over bus and ferry timetables, and make detailed plans for the coming months, in a way that was most unlike my normal practice. My habit has always been to just wander out into the wilds with no clear destination in mind, and see what crosses my path.
- Beat stress, boost your immune system and gain confidence: How to start cold-water swimming (and feel the benefits)
- David Attenborough’s new BBC film showcases the wildlife found in the ‘greenest city in the world’. You’ll be surprised where it is…
Over the coming months I crisscrossed the Highlands and islands of Scotland on public transport, with ventures away to North Wales and to North West England. My travels took me far out into the hills, to mountaintop and marsh, and to the stormlashed shores of numerous isles. There were long treks, times when transport failed me and I had to hitchhike, and dozens of nights spent wild camping.
A quest for beautiful bird calls
Some of the calls I heard were utterly beautiful, such as those of the waders, while some were frankly ridiculous, such as the strange mechanical calls of storm petrels from within their rocky hideaways, or the maniacal laughter of the red-throated diver.
But all were immensely evocative and felt integral to the soundscape and the spirit of the wild places they call their home, so that their absence would leave the landscape hollowed out and somehow barren.
It struck me that the reason I had not previously encountered and heard some of these species is because their numbers are in steep decline, and it is not just me that is in danger of losing their calls forever, it is everyone.
Yet it was not always the rarest species that were the most challenging to find. With some species, such as the corncrakes on the Hebridean machair, the bitterns in their reedbed redoubts, or the black grouse displaying on their lekking sites, it was simply a matter of finding out where the last few of these birds still gathered, making my way there when the time was right, and waiting.
- Blue Monday: Is this the most depressing day of the year?
- Could this easy 10-minute habit help prevent cancer? It "sends powerful signals to the body" says consultant
More of a challenge were those species that do not gather in clusters, but rather are thin on the ground, spread over a huge range. The greenshank is one of my favourite birds, a pale, elegant wader whose nesting sites are notoriously elusive.
There are only a thousand or so pairs of them, and they nest widely scattered across the flows and bogs of the uplands of the Scottish Highlands. I knew they were present on my home turf, for they would gather on the shores nearby before and after breeding. At the shore they were remarkably vocal, with a vast range of calls, but it was not these calls I was after.
Rather it was their song-flight, spoken of in awe by those few who have had the good fortune to hear it. The birds share nesting duties and tend to change guard at dawn and dusk, and this is when you have a chance of being present for this elusive display.
My only option was to track the bird down to its nesting grounds in the hills, and camp out alongside them. I set out on a sunny spring day with my tiny tent and hiked deep into the mountains until I came to what felt like the perfect location, the kind of place that I would choose to call home if I was a greenshank.
A shallow lochan on a high, exposed ridge surrounded by peat hag, with an expansive view over the neighbouring mountains to the shining sea beyond. A good sign was the golden plovers calling from the heather-clad ridges of peat. This bird, too, has a beautiful, haunting call, and it would undoubtedly have made my list had I not heard it before.
- Nature’s hidden miracle workers: 7 ecosystem engineers quietly transforming the planet
- Top 10 wildest and most extreme places to see wildlife in the British Isles
At first light, I awoke to a torrent of song directly above me. I put in my hearing aids and crept quietly out of my tent. The bird was flying in a broad circle that encompassed the whole of the ridge-top, rising and falling, towering and plunging, and not for one moment letting up in that delirious, emotive song that set the mountains ringing.
It was the most truly songlike of anything I heard that year, a perfect reminder of all that I had lost, but pitched low enough to sit comfortably within my remaining range.
As I watched, its mate flew up from their nest and joined the display, wing to wing. I did not wait for the song cycle to finish. Instead, I quickly packed down my tent and slipped away. I wanted to leave the scene with the birds in full flow as I did not know if I would ever hear them again. In my memory they are singing still.
