Folk Musician Sam Lee Guides Listeners to Witness Bird Song and Climate Grief

The air in the Sussex woods held a damp, earthy chill, the kind that settles into your bones when the sun dips below the tree line and the world shrinks to the circle of your flashlight beam. You stand shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, a hushed congregation waiting for a signal from the dark. Then, Sam Lee raises a hand, and the silence isn’t just an absence of noise — it’s a presence, heavy and expectant. When the Nightingale finally sings, it doesn’t just fill the space; it pierces it, a golden thread of sound that feels less like biology and more like memory.

This is the experience folk musician Sam Lee has been guiding people through for years, and it’s the same enchantment that brought me to the Western Slope this past week, where we are trying to understand what it means to lose something so beautiful it becomes a ghost before it’s even gone.

Lee’s work with the Nightingale isn’t just about birdwatching. It’s part ecological music emergence, part enchantment, part heartbreak. The Nightingale, that tiny bird with an enormous heart, flies all the way from West Africa to mate in the Isle of Albion, calling out bravely and brazenly for a lover. But what makes the song so urgent is the context in which it’s sung. Over 95% of the Nightingale population is gone. Global warming has destroyed much of their mating grounds, and the population has plummeted. To listen to them now is to witness the impacts of a changing planet, to accompany a creature as it disappears from us forever.

I found myself thinking about our own valley as I listened to the recording of that Sussex night, replaying the song until the static of the digital file couldn’t drown out the purity of the bird’s call. We talk about loss here in terms of snowpack and water rights, but we rarely talk about it in terms of sound. We just experienced the lowest snowpack on record, a fact that sits heavy in the gut of every rancher and homeowner in Delta and Montrose counties. The earth is drying up, the trees are thirsty, and the creatures that rely on the delicate balance of wet and cold are feeling the squeeze.

Lee’s book, Heartwood: The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees, explores this immense heartache of attending to the Earth as so much is lost. In the final chapter, titled "Death Doula For a Dying World," he explores the idea of being an apprentice, a companion, in the great dying. We are in the sixth mass extinction event. It’s not a future threat; it’s here. But it’s rare to practice that invitation so directly, to stand in the dark and let the song of a disappearing creature open a portal for us to become transfigured within.

When Lee and his collaborator, musician Nessi Gomes, began to join the bird and sing alongside, the effect was profound. It wasn’t a performance; it was a offering. The music felt like it was weaving an interspecies singularity, a moment where time vanished and you could sense the ancient oracle of the bird merging with the human voice. I started to weep, not just for the bird, but for the melting glaciers, the bleaching coral reefs, the wildfires to come, the dried-up rivers. In this intermingling of grief and love, something else was born — a recognition that we are not separate from the dying world, but part of its rhythm.

Days later, the sound still echoes in me. I turn my attention now to what is slipping through our fingers here, to the specific, local grief of watching the aspen leaves turn gold while the air grows warmer, the rivers run lower. We don’t have a Nightingale in the same way Sussex does, but we have our own vanishing songs, the rustle of the cutthroat trout in the Roaring Fork, the call of the magpie at dusk, the crunch of gravel under tires on Highway 6.

There’s a warmth to the way Lee describes the experience, a willingness to let the grief in without trying to fix it immediately. It’s not about saving the bird; it’s about witnessing it. It’s about standing in the dark, letting the cold bite your cheeks, and listening until your own breath matches the rhythm of the wild. That’s the invitation. That’s the work. And it’s worth the drive, worth the silence, worth the tears.