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Blanc Sceol-Listening with skylarks


Blanc Sceol

Listening with skylarks

Blanc Sceol (Stephen Shiell & Hannah White)

Start: 02/05 05:00 UTC+1

Wanstead flats

A guided listening journey live streamed from Wanstead Flats, one of the last nesting places of the skylark in London.
Revisiting the song of the London skylark. A guided listening journey live streamed from Wanstead flats, one of the songbird's last nesting places in London. Breeding pairs here are in sharp decline but finally, after much campaigning, the London Corporation have erected fences around their nesting sights, and their song-flight has returned for another year.

With it's distinctive escalating rhythmic trill, the lark has been met with reverence and want for thousands of years, at once the subject of poetry and caught in their thousands for the dinner table. In the song today we can still listen in common for contradictions, perhaps hearing something of ourselves; a tenacity and a slow decline, a coming and a going, an up and a down.

Image credit www.alyneecology.co.uk
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