Because of the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic many people noticed the silence, the absence of noise. Across several countries of the Northern Hemisphere, they paid attention and listened, feeling as if it was a spring for the birds, silent for humans but resounding for the birds. Just the opposite of another dystopian moment, the Silent Spring that, in the sixties, Rachel Carson portrayed and feared in her book, with no American robins left to welcome the good weather, due to pesticides. During the pandemic I listened to a blackbird who, in his songs, mimicked multiple sounds from humans and other birds. Even from one absent in the urban gardens: a nightingale, only heard through the blackbird, in this indirect version of a fleeting, aural encounter. I will contrast these two silent and resounding springs, decades apart, and the absences and presences of the songs of thrushes (American robins, blackbirds) and nightingales in these dystopian contexts, to reflect about listening, silences, pauses, and losses.