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THE festival season is upon us - but the sound of silence has also descended on the countryside.

- Stuart Winter

Warblers are no longer warbling and cuckoos have called their last.

Nightingales have been put on mute. Exhausted robins are resting voices while replenishing feathers worn ragged by the labours of parenthood.

Although spring’s dawn chorus is a fading earworm, one headbanger still blaring out dawn to dusk is arguably nature's most powerful vocalist by weight to sound.

The Eurasian wren, a chocolatecoated, ping pong ball of a bird with a sticky up tail and barrow boy’s gape, has a voice that defies its diminutive proportions.