More related content:<\/p>\n
Listen live: singing with nightingales<\/a><\/li>\n
Nightingale guide: species facts and how Britain\u2019s songbird is now under threat<\/a><\/li>\n
Best places to hear a nightingale in spring<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>
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Says Birkhead, author of Birds and Us<\/em>, a history of the last 12,000 years of bird-human interactions: \u201cWe now know that her initial 1924 recording involved a \u2018nightingale substitute\u2019, but in the following years it was the real thing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n
In those far-off days, Harrison was a cellist of great renown. While largely forgotten now, she was a contemporary and an inspiration for two of the greatest English classical composers, Edward Elgar and Frederick Delius. It was apparently her custom to practise outside and, in her own words, it was during a session of Rimsky-Korsakov\u2019s Chant Hindou<\/em> that her garden nightingale was stimulated to sing back at her. Not long afterwards she managed to persuade a very reluctant Lord Reith, first director-general of the BBC, to try the outside broadcast.<\/p>\n
You can easily imagine the exorbitant risk they were taking at the time. All birds are notoriously fickle, even more so when there are BBC engineers are wandering all over their habitat. What if the wild bird didn\u2019t sing at its allotted time? It seems that the BBC had a backup plan. They engaged the services of a professional bird song imitator, or siffleur, thought to be a certain Maude Gould whose stage name was Madame Saberon. She duly stepped in.<\/p>\n
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