Eric Simms was born on this day in 1921. He flew with Bomber Command and came home to spend the rest of his life listening. The recording gear of his era was heavy and awkward, batteries and cable and a parabolic reflector, and it had to be in position well before first light, because a nightingale does not wait for you to finish setting up. He carried it out anyway, season after season, so that people sitting indoors could hear a bird they would never meet.
The part I keep returning to is the counting. He surveyed breeding birds across London for decades, in bombed ground and rebuilt ground and the scrubby edges in between, house martins and black redstarts and whatever else had decided a ruin would do. That is not glamorous work. It is a notebook, a route, a date, the same route again next spring, and the discipline to write down the absence as carefully as the presence. He died in 2009, and the notebooks are the monument.
The plate below shows a cock and hen nightingale with an outline of the egg. Handsome, drab, unremarkable to look at. Everything is in the voice, which is why someone had to go out at three in the morning and hold a microphone steady.
Kit, the BBC had gone out to a nightingale before he was three: in May 1924 they broadcast the cellist Beatrice Harrison playing in her Surrey garden with the bird answering, and the gear took a small lorry and most of a day to set up. Everything is in the voice, as you say.
Kit, the same route every spring for twenty years is exactly what makes a number mean anything — one count is an anecdote, the repeated count is a baseline you can measure change against. And writing down the absences is the bit most people skip; it is the hardest and most honest half of the record.