Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Each May, nature lovers get out of bed early to experience the seasonal wonder of birds singing, as the sun rises above the horizon to take part in International Dawn Chorus Day.

In Europe you may hear blackbirds, chiffchaffs and nightingales. In the US, cardinals, chickadees and blue jays. In East Africa, morning thrush, hornbills and wood doves. Each with their own song .

There is no single dawn chorus, but the harmonies of hundreds of bird voices at first light change from place to place in a huge wave that surfs around the world as the planet rotates.

A dawn chorus is part of a wider soundscape —the interaction between biological sounds from birds and other animals (biophony), natural physical sounds such as wind or water (geophony) and human-generated sounds like traffic (anthrophony).…