The Guardian: Listen to Britain’s dawn chorus of 1976 – the dramatic loss of birdsong in 50 years.

The Guardian recreated a decade-by-decade audio landscape of what the past morning symphonies of birds sounded like before 73 million of them were lost over the past five decades in Great Britain. The story also mentions a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’, a gradual shifting of accepted norms that applies, in this case to the natural environment, be it habit loss, species decline or the rapidly rising temperatures brought on by the climate crisis.

“What we have is a shifting baseline,” said Dr Rob Robinson, a senior scientist at the BTO who researches wild bird populations. “People engaging in nature today are going to think the numbers they are seeing are normal, particularly children. But if you go back 50 years, they would have been able to experience a much richer environment.”

And

This “shifting baseline syndrome” – a gradual shifting of the accepted norm when it comes to the natural environment – is, said nature writer Robert Macfarlane, an “enormously powerful and I think very pernicious, psychological mechanism whereby each new generation measures loss from the degraded baseline that it grew up into. We’re part of a web. We’re wired into the wild world. Birds help us remember that, and they can do it in a very everyday way.”

Give it a listen – possibly the most mindful 35 seconds you’ll experience today.