In our country, one of the most beautiful singing birds in the world, the eared owl, is also common in the bushes of inhabited areas. This sparrow-sized bird with a solid brown upper body and reddish tail is famous not only for its loudness and the variety of its song, which can be heard for kilometers, but also for the fact that the males also sing at night. The species is a long-distance migrant, spending the winter in sub-Saharan Africa. The first birds arrive in Hungary in the first half of April, but the majority arrive in Hungary at the end of April and beginning of May, and the males start singing almost immediately.
In its statement, MME reminds us that the sound of the ear müle has enchanted people and inspired artists for thousands of years. Stravinsky wrote an opera from Andersen’s fairy tale Fülemüle, for which he was inspired by the singing art of the fülemüle. In Handel’s organ concerto, the cuckoo’s stanzas are also played. The nightingale protagonist of Oscar Wilde’s novella The Nightingale and the Rose sacrificed her song and blood on the altar of love, but the bird also appears in the poems of János Arany, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats. In the heyday of radio, in England, the BBC broadcast an open-air concert where the cellist Beatrice Harrison played a duet in her garden with the singing ears in May 1924. The experiment was such a hit with the audience that the radio broadcast was repeated the following month and the following twelve springs, it reads.
The constantly updated list of the 2024 “Fülemülék night” program locations can be found on the home page of the MME website, among the featured news.
