The call of the wild

Birdsong is timeless — and timelessness makes great radio, as the work of Monica Whitlock shows

One of BBC radio’s first ever live broadcasts, in 1924, featured the song of a nightingale as it “duetted” with a cellist called Beatrice Harrison in woodland near her home in Surrey. A huge hit with the — as it were — fledgling audience, the programme established not just the appeal of birdsong on the radio, but a tradition that continues to this day.

Tweet of the Day has been a fixture on Radio 4 since 2013 – a two-minute reverie with a seemingly limitless cast of bird characters. Something similar recently got under way with the arrival of Tom McKinney in the Radio 3 Breakfast chair.

McKinney is a serious birder who has relatively little problem getting up at 4.30am in order to present the show — he’ll happily get up even earlier than that in pursuit of some rare bird action. It’s a passion that lies behind one of Breakfast’s USPs — the birdsong McKinney treats us to at the start of each programme, a mini-feature he’s carried over from presenting the Sunday morning Radio 3 show.

One can’t fail to be captivated by the sound of birdsong, and there’s more of it on Radio 3 this week with a second outing for a wonderful series called Sounds of Wild Poland.

The series is a showcase for the incredible work of a Polish sound recordist called Izabela Dluzyk. Born blind, Izabela grew up hearing the world with an acuteness that led her to want to record it. What followed were explorations she made with her microphones deep into one of Europe’s last remaining primeval forests, which straddles the border between Poland and Belarus.

The call of the bittern is a sound Izabela was especially thrilled to record, likewise the thrush nightingale, to which a whole episode in the series is dedicated. “Nature recording is an adventure,” Izabela says. “A way of delving into another world.” There’s a magic to the series I’ve not heard anywhere else.

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Radio 3 listeners first met Izabela in a 2023 programme, Izabela in the Forest. That was the work of longtime BBC World Service producer Monica Whitlock, and Sounds of Wild Poland is her follow-up.

Monica has a special feel for this type of radio, by which I don’t just mean the sounds of the natural world, but radio whose subject is really timelessness. What could be more timeless than a primeval forest?

The concept of existing outside of time is present in an astonishing story Monica told in The Boy in the Peking Hotel, which aired on Radio 4 in 2023 and recounted how a British family relocated to China in the 1960s, the parents committed Communists, their son — aged eight at the time it happened — destined to spend six formative years in a largely sealed-off world.

In a much more sombre context, the theme is present in a 2021 series Monica co-produced about life in the Warsaw Ghetto, Voices from the Ghetto, with its testimony “We exist outside of time”. Likewise in programmes she made about teenage life during lockdown (Almost Adults), and about the day-to-day constraints experienced by a young Afghan woman (Our Whole Life is a Secret), which are also worth checking out. So too I think will be an upcoming programme of Monica’s centred on a slice of pre-history and a central figure’s quest to unearth its secrets.

I was just talking to Monica about all this and she said, “I like making radio when you don’t quite know what you’re going to find”. When the urge to fulfill certain criteria seems to be gaining prevalence across the creative realm, long may such such radio still be made.

Sounds of Wild Poland is here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0020yjw

The Boy in the Peking Hotel is here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0fsg03j