Musician Cosmo Sheldrake is on a mission to highlight the loss of UK birdlife with an album of avian chatter
I’m sitting by a pond with musician Cosmo Sheldrake, wearing a pair of headphones that are attached to a large, fluffy microphone a few feet away. An obstacle course of wires surrounds us and there are two more microphones hidden in a bush by a bird feeder. It looks like lockdown’s answer to a silent disco, but far from being engrossed in techno music we’re soaking up natural sounds performed by the birds of the dawn chorus.
This is how Sheldrake has started many mornings since the Covid-19 pandemic began, in an off-grid cottage hidden in woods outside the New Forest near Fordingbridge in Hampshire. He has just made an album of avian conversations called Wake Up Calls and today he is showing me how he makes his wild recordings. I arrive at 6.30am to hear the moment howling owls sign off and pass over to songbirds making their morning announcements.
