Who sings first?ENRO

  1. A dawn, bird by bird

    Who sings first?

    Before sunrise the birds don’t all start at once. They come in one by one, in nearly the same order every morning, each waiting for its own amount of light. Scroll through one spring dawn: the sky is computed, the songs are real recordings, and each bird starts at the light that matches its measured average start.

    When the robin starts where you live ↓

    Scroll to let the sun rise

  2. About 70 minutes before sunrise · sun 12° below the horizon

    Still night#

    The stars are out, the meadow is a dark shape, and the wood is silent. In the east, low down, the sky has started to pale, though your eyes can barely tell yet.

    Everything on this page is driven by one number: how far the sun is below the horizon. The sky’s colours are computed from it, mostly from the way air scatters sunlight. So is the moment each bird joins in.

  3. 58 minutes before sunrise

    The robin goes first#

    To you it is still dark. To the robin it is morning.

    From January to mid-April 2012, two recorders in each of 12 small woods in southern Germany caught the dawn. Across 686 recorder-mornings, the robin started on average 58 minutes before sunrise, earlier than any of the other five species the study followed.

  4. 53 minutes before sunrise

    Then the blackbird#

    Four or five minutes later comes the blackbird’s slow, low, fluting song, the one you hear from rooftops in town on spring evenings too.

    In the German woods the blackbird started on average 53 minutes before sunrise.

  5. 49 minutes before sunrise

    The song thrush says everything twice#

    The song thrush repeats each short phrase two or three times before moving on to the next. Listen for it: once you notice the repeats, you will never mistake it again.

    In southern Germany it started 49 minutes before sunrise. In a forest south of Paris it came in a little ahead of the blackbird: the first three are close together, and their order can swap.

  6. After the thrushes, before the tits

    The wren, small and very loud#

    One of the smallest birds in Europe, with a song that carries across the whole meadow: a fast cascade of trills, tail cocked straight up.

    The German study did not follow wrens. In a forest south of Paris, unpublished recordings of 13 woodland species, shown in a 2020 review, put the wren next in line, after the robin and the two thrushes and before the tits.

  7. 31 minutes before sunrise · light enough to read outdoors

    Light enough to read: the great tit#

    The sun is now about 6° below the horizon, the start of civil twilight. Outdoors you could read a book, and the great tit starts its see-saw of two notes.

    Here the order loosens. The great tit started on average 31 minutes before sunrise, but its start varied more than that of any bird before it: a standard deviation of 26 minutes.

  8. 16 minutes before sunrise

    The blue tit#

    A quarter of an hour before the sun: a couple of thin, high notes and then a quick trill. The colour is coming back into things, and you can see the blue cap and yellow front.

    Average start in the German woods: 16 minutes before sunrise.

  9. 9 minutes before sunrise

    The chaffinch, last of the six#

    A run of notes that speeds up and ends in a flourish, like a bowler’s run-up. It is a seed-eater, and seed-eaters have long been suspected of starting later, though no one has properly tested it.

    Of the six species measured in Germany it was the last to start: on average only 9 minutes before sunrise, almost 49 minutes after the robin.

  10. Sunrise

    Everyone at once#

    By the time the sun clears the hill, the chiffchaff has joined too, calling out its own two-note name; near Paris the chiffchaff came in just after the chaffinch. Now all eight are singing, each with its own voice, and the ribbons of light show the notes of the very recordings you are hearing.

    The point is the order. From robin to chaffinch is about 49 minutes here, half that in the forest south of Paris, but the order holds, morning after morning, wood after wood. By 1961 a study had found that the light at which each species starts shifts with the season and the weather, while the order of species stays much the same.

  11. Why this order?

    Look at their eyes#

    In 1963 the naturalist Edward Armstrong suggested you could guess when a bird starts singing by looking at its eyes. In 2002 a study of European species tested it: species with larger eyes began to sing earlier, at lower light. Body size mattered too, but less: for the same eye size, bigger species tended to start later.

    Large eyes gather more light. One idea is that a bird that sees in the half-dark can find food, or spot danger, sooner; another is that it simply can afford to sing earlier. The early singers in this dawn are the robin and the two thrushes; the latecomers are the small tits and the chaffinch.

  12. Under a street lamp

    Street lights move the clock#

    Half of the German woods had street lamps nearby. An earlier analysis of the same woods (11 of the 12, five of them lit) found that where lamps shone, five of the six species started singing earlier: about 10 minutes earlier for the song thrush and about 20 for the robin and the great tit. Traffic noise made no difference to the start; light did.

    So in a lit street the robin’s “morning” can begin well before the one in the dark wood. In towns some robins even sing through the night, though a study in Sheffield found that daytime noise predicted it better than street light.

  13. And this week?

    In autumn, the robin sings almost alone#

    The full chorus belongs to the breeding season, from late winter into early summer. Go out at dawn in October and most of these birds are quiet.

    Not the robin. Robins of both sexes sing through autumn and winter to defend a territory of their own, about 500 square metres, where they find their food until spring; their winter song is more plaintive and drawn-out than the spring one. The robin you hear tomorrow morning could be a female.

When the robin starts where you live#

Pick a town and a morning. The page assumes each bird waits for the same light it waited for in the German woods, and finds the time when the sun reaches that point where you are. The soft bar around each time spans one standard deviation either way: most mornings fall inside it.

The farther north you are, and the closer to midsummer, the longer dawn lasts: the sun climbs at a shallower angle, so the robin’s light comes earlier before sunrise. In the German woods, mostly in March and early April, the robin started on average 58 minutes before sunrise; on a late-April morning in London the same light comes 70 minutes before.

Which morning

The wren and the chiffchaff were not in the German study, so they get no clock time here: only their place in the order, from first-song times recorded in a forest south of Paris.

How this page works#

The start times. The six measured times are means from Da Silva, Valcu and Kempenaers (2015): dawns from 6 January to 17 April 2012 in 12 small woods in southern Germany (11 in most analyses), 1,579 recorder-mornings analysed in all. Half the woods had street lamps and half had traffic noise; the means pool them all, so in an unlit wood the starts are likely a few minutes later, and they cover late winter as well as spring.

From minutes to light. Minutes before sunrise mean different amounts of light at different places and dates, so the page converts each mean into the sun’s elevation at that moment, averaged over the mornings from 1 March to 17 April, when most of these species sang at dawn, at the study’s location (Seewiesen, 48° N). The robin’s average start comes out at the sun 10° below the horizon, the chaffinch’s at 2.3° below. For your town, the page finds when the sun reaches the same elevation. That birds key on light this way is an assumption, supported by the eye-size studies; cloud, rain (which delays the start), street lights and each bird’s own habits all shift it.

The wren and the chiffchaff were not in the German study. Their place in the order comes from a chart of first-song times in a forest south of Paris (unpublished data of Llusia, Aubin and Sueur, shown in Gil and Llusia 2020), read by eye; the page gives them no clock time.

The sky is computed for every frame: sunlight scattered by air molecules, haze and ozone, the same model as the site’s piece on the blue hour after sunset, with stars to magnitude 4.8 that fade as the sky brightens. Once the sun is more than about 8° below the horizon this model goes dark overhead, so a soft blue fill, an estimate rather than a calculation, stands in for light scattered more than once. The exposure rises as the sky darkens, the way an eye adapts, up to a limit. The landscape and the birds are drawn, and the sun’s disc is drawn larger than life; their colours come from that sky. The song ribbons are the strongest pitch in each 10 milliseconds of the recording you hear, drawn as it plays.

The sound is real recordings from xeno-canto, credited below, trimmed, matched in loudness, and played together; the real chorus is denser. Most of these were recorded in Romania.

Sources#

  • Da Silva A, Valcu M, Kempenaers B (2015). Light pollution alters the phenology of dawn and dusk singing in common European songbirds. Phil Trans R Soc B 370: 20140126. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  • Da Silva A, Samplonius JM, Schlicht E, Valcu M, Kempenaers B (2014). Artificial night lighting rather than traffic noise affects the daily timing of dawn and dusk singing in common European songbirds. Behavioral Ecology 25: 1037–1047. research.rug.nl
  • Gil D, Llusia D (2020). The bird dawn chorus revisited. In Aubin T, Mathevon N (eds), Coding Strategies in Vertebrate Acoustic Communication, Springer, 45–90 (Fig 3.2: first-song times in a forest south of Paris, unpublished data of Llusia, Aubin and Sueur). doi.org
  • Thomas RJ, Székely T, Cuthill IC et al. (2002). Eye size in birds and the timing of song at dawn. Proc R Soc B 269: 831–837. doi.org
  • Non-breeding European robins adjust their song in noisy environments (2025). Behavioral Ecology (autumn song of 25 robins; both sexes defend winter territories). pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  • Fuller RA, Warren PH, Gaston KJ (2007). Daytime noise predicts nocturnal singing in urban robins. Biology Letters 3: 368–370. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  • Bruneton E (2017). A qualitative and quantitative evaluation of 8 clear sky models (the sky model’s constants). github.com

The voices