Nowadays, among fields and woods, the noise level by day is high—too high for some kinds of animal to tolerate. Few places are far from human noise—cars, buses, motorcycles, tractors, lorries. The sound of a housing estate in the morning is audible a long way off. People who record birdsong generally do it very early—before six o’clock—if they can. Soon after that, the invasion of distant noise in most woodland becomes too constant and too loud. During the last fifty years the silence of much of the country has been destroyed.
