Live stream: peterc
Recording: Bornholmer II garden area, pre-dawn 05.32, april 19 2026, nightingale snatches with dawn chorus blackbirds & sparrows - Peter Cusack
Bornholmer II kleingartenanlage, Berlin, Germany
Peter Cusack
Latitude: +52.55640221807996°
Longitude: +13.40318888425827°
The Bornholmer kleinegartenanlage is an area of small gardens (similar to allotments in the UK). Such gardens offer a lot of varied habitats for birds and there's a surprising variety, including nightingale, redstarts, lesser whitethroat, blackcap. The mics are fairly close to a path so people pass by regularly and very close to a loop of track where trams turn round at the end of their route. It is not used so much but, particularly in the evenings and early mornings, if you hear an approaching rumbling that briefly gets very loud, it is a tram No 50.
But there are other layers not apparent in the sound. I have been placing streams in this place for 6 years, so know it quite well. It's been possible to sense that over that time the character of the area has changed. Yesterday (April 19, 2026), for the first time ever, one of the gardeners came to ask what I was doing as I was setting up. He was happy to hear that I was interested in nature as he rarely met anyone who was. He then told me that he was now paying super attention to security as small time criminality had increased dramatically in the area. Thefts of even the most worthless items was common (he had had all the wiring stripped from his garden just for the copper), so he made a point of checking when he saw someone acting strangely (eg me and stream boxes). This was now quite often. There is a tram track loop here where they turn round for the return journey. One of people he checked had, unbelievably, built a mound of stones in the middle of the track, which could have caused serious damage to a passing tram. He removed it.
I tell this story because listening - particularly remotely - can be a bubble that isolates one from many other aspects of a place. I find it very valuable when in the process, unexpected conversations happen and new contacts are made that give a much wider, and detailed, local context to what is being heard. Sometimes this can be disturbing, but we live in disturbing times and it's important to have reminders of that in connection to the listening we do. Local wildlife is also having to deal with this full range of human behaviour which, of course, has long term impacts on the biodiversity of the area.