16 April 2013
Last night at the Royal Society of Literature, nature writer Richard Mabey inveighed against the MOD’s release of land at Lodge Hill to build 5,000 houses.
Lodge Hill, in the Medway, is the historic habitat of 90 pairs of nightingales, two per cent of the population surviving in England. Mabey, backed by historian Richard Holmes, invoked the tradition of identity with the bird, from Shelley, Coleridge, Keats and Clare, and included an excerpt from a BBC recording of a duet between Barbara Harrison on cello and a nightingale.
The average return date after winter in Africa of nightingales is April 17, coinciding with the obsequies of another of the nation’s shrill warblers.
