‘To improve my stock of metaphors.’
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when asked why he attended lectures on science
Harry Mortimer Batten knew how to cut a Romantic down to size:
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
That’s Wordsworth, of course – lines three and four of his 1802 poem ‘To the Cuckoo’. The poem is part of the eleven-stanza Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, in which the poet (then a hoary thirty-two years of age) reflected on the loss of innocence and man’s connection with the divine in nature. In ‘To the Cuckoo’, the bird’s ‘twofold shout’ recalls to Wordsworth the ‘golden time’ of his schooldays; then, as now, he writes, the cuckoo was ‘No bird, but an invisible thing, / A voice, a mystery’:
To seek thee did I often rove
Through woods and on the green;
And thou wert still a hope, a love;
Still longed for, never seen.
H. Mortimer Batten, author of Our Garden Birds (1934) and numerous other popular nature works, wasn’t having any of it. ‘How Wordsworth can have lived in the Lake District and yet from his schooldays till middle manhood have known the cuckoo only “as a wandering voice” is surely beyond the intelligent observation of the present day,’ he wrote. ‘Wordsworth must have seen thousands of cuckoos. Probably he thought they were sparrowhawks or something.’
But then, as Batten points out, ‘it was only recently that it was realised that poetry might be used to express common sense, and it is as well not to take the word of bygone poets with regard to natural history subjects’.
It’s an exercise in advanced point-missing, of course. Batten is being wilfully obtuse. Cuckoos are elusive, more easily heard than seen (if not literally invisible), and so Wordsworth uses the bird and its shout as a metaphor for those other things that we can sense but not see, whose calls we can hear but which remain out of sight and out of reach – transient happiness, glimpsed spirituality, fleeting enlightenment. But try explaining that to H. Mortimer Batten.
This has long been a fraught relationship. Appropriately enough, it has to do with territory. At the first sign of an interloping poet on his patch, the ornithologist is up on his perch, fluffing his plumage and clearing his throat: ‘Now it’s all very well saying “the lark’s on the wing”, Mr Browning, but what species of the family Alaudidae are you referring to, exactly?’ And the poets are often no better, because can birdsong really be just a question of hormonal balance and molecular genetics, is beauty something you can log on a sonogram, aren’t the ornithologists missing the whole point? . . .
The fact is that there’s poetry in the science and science in the poetry; each needn’t be a lone cock-robin, chippy and turf-fixated, scrapping on the borderlines for each fraction of territory. There’s plenty of common ground.
Look, for instance, at this character: an expert, a man who clearly knows his bird songs inside out, jibing at ‘outsiders’ who are less well informed:
Your Londoners . . . I believe fancy every bird they hear after sunset a nightingale. I remember when I was there last walking with a friend in the fields of Shacklewell we saw a gentleman & lady listning very attentive by the side of a shrubbery and when we came up we heard them lavishing praises on the beautiful song of the nightingale which happend to be a thrush.
So, in the 1820s, wrote John Clare, the Northamptonshire labourer’s boy who was perhaps England’s greatest nature poet – a poet, yes, but an expert too, and as protective of his hard-earned knowhow as any university don. (Clare knew his ‘clod-brown’ nightingales and their ‘out-sobbing songs’ well. His poem ‘The Progress of Rhyme’ offers a careful transcription of the bird’s ‘witching notes’: ‘Chew-chew . . . cheer-cheer . . . cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up . . . tweet tweet jug jug jug . . . wew-wew wew-wew, chur-chur chur-chur, woo-it woo-it, tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew, chew-rit chew-rit . . . will-will will-will, grig-grig grig-grig’.)
Let’s consider two ways of looking at a nightingale.
One is that Luscinia megarhynchos is an insectivorous passerine species of the family Turdidae (or perhaps Muscicapidae), migratory between the Afrotropical and Palearctic realms, divisible into races L. m. megarhynchos, L.m. africana and L.m. golzii. Its song is varied and unstructured, with abrupt pitch changes and a sudden, throaty trill.
The other is Shakespeare’s ‘lamenting Philomel’, the grieving songstress of Virgil and Ovid, Aeschylus and Sophocles; the bird’s song is a high requiem, a plaintive anthem, choral minstrelsy, a wanton song, the voice of desire, a throe of the heart, a mournful melody of song; it expresseth what grief her breast oppresseth.
I could go on, at length, in either vein. What is a nightingale? It’s both and neither of these things. It’s 21 grams of blood, muscle, feather and bone. To call it a species is to fit it to a framework that no nightingale would comprehend, a human framework; to talk about the status of a species – whether it declines, whether it thrives – is to tell a story that, to a nightingale, would make no sense at all. These are human ideas, structures we’ve put together for our own purposes (even if that purpose is to protect nightingales; a nightingale, really, is too busy to give a fig whether we protect nightingales or not).
The scientists and the poets have essentially been doing the same thing all this time. They’ve constructed a nightingale. They’ve built the thing we now associate with the word ‘nightingale’, and it’s not the scientists’ idea of a nightingale, or the poets’, but everyone’s: it’s the human idea of a nightingale, and it really is a terrific thing. It’s a thesis and a poem and a moodboard and a spider-diagram and a song and a symphony – and it’s all still embodied, just about, in that lurking, flitting, tail-pumping handful of feathers, hollering in a Sussex hazel thicket and trying not to die.
In practice, we each of us only get to see the nightingale we’ve built from a certain angle, and at a certain distance; none of us ever sees the whole thing. But from what we see of it, we each build our own nightingale, and carry it about with us – and I think that’s pretty terrific, too.*
When I think of a nightingale, the stuff from the poetry side and the stuff from the science side aren’t kept apart: the whole lot bundles together into a busy jostle of nightingale-ness (Coleridge out-shouting the rest, but years of bird-book study in there too [rufous rump, pale eye-ring, breeds May–Jun, 5–7 eggs], along with scraps of T.S. Eliot and the memory of the only living nightingale I ever saw: an unlikely vagrant outside my halls-of-residence window one autumn day in York). They don’t mix, exactly – the same way I’m still me and you’re still you if we’re thrown together in a crowd – but I can, so to speak, hear them both at once, just like you can hear two duetting streams of song from a songbird’s double-barrelled syrinx.
The American poet Amy Clampitt wrote a wonderful poem called ‘Syrinx’. In it, she compares the syrinx* – the bird’s voice box – to a ‘foghorn that’s all lung’. It’s a wind instrument, too imprecise to shape consonants; the soaring song, in the end, is ‘pure vowel’. Clampitt finds freedom – freedom from detail, from ‘the particular’ – in birdsong. But this isn’t the ethereal music of a ‘blithe spirit’; this is no ‘wandering voice’. Birdsong here is a material thing, a fact of bioacoustics and the physics of air; Clampitt draws a clear line from the properties of the syrinx – its limitations, in fact – to the qualities of the song.
This is why I’m here in a gloomy lab in the bowels of Leeds University’s Garstang Building, poking about in a partridge.
This book isn’t just about birdsong; it’s about the places where birdsong and human culture overlap and interact. It’s easy to forget that science is a culture, too.
‘The trachea bifurcates here, into two primary bronchi,’ explains Dr Peter Tickle, tweezering apart the tissues, ‘so you’ve basically got a dual voice-box; air can pass over two vibrating surfaces. So it can sing two different notes at once.’ Peter is a research fellow in the university’s School of Biological Sciences, and he’s kindly agreed to show me what a syrinx looks like.
In Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Widgeon’, a man plucking a widgeon (a kind of wild duck, larger than a teal but smaller than a mallard) finds the bird’s ‘voice box’. He blows on it, and finds himself making ‘unexpectedly / his own small widgeon cries’.
It might be a poem about the appropriation, the theft, of voices that aren’t our own. Or it might be about keeping alive a voice that has fallen silent. But it is unexpected, in any case; that this – a hollow nub of gristle, no bigger than a broad bean and filmed with sticky blood – can make that : a widgeon’s yelping whistle, or a partridge’s cluck, or a cuckoo’s diphone, or a blackcap’s wild note – and from there, a Coleridge poem or a Messiaen flute piece or simply that kick of the heart that greets the first chiffchaff song of the summer. It all stems from a modified half-inch of windpipe.
‘Unexpected’, in fact, barely covers it. It seems miraculous.
After the dissection, Peter shows me some videos made by researchers of birds’ syrinxes* in action – and these, too, seem miraculous. Look them up on YouTube (search for ‘universal mechanisms of sound production’). They’re amazing. The slowed-down monochrome fluctuations of the membranes of the syrinx in full (simulated) song are alien and extraordinary and madly beautiful. There is, again, nothing ethereal here; we can see ribs of cartilage, glistening expanses of translucent membrane – everything you don’t want to find in your chicken sandwich. But then the air ripples through and the muscles (here triggered by electrodes) contract; what the researchers call ‘tissue waves’ flutter through the syrinx, over and over. It becomes gulping and squid-like. And this is the thing that makes the song.
Some people might think that it spoils or devalues birdsong, looking at it in this manner, breaking it down into its component parts. I’d disagree. Birdsong acts on us, as we’ve seen, in a lot of different ways: it can accentuate our happiness, or pile melancholy on top of melancholy – and (another thing we’ve learned from the poets) it makes us want to talk about birdsong. Meanwhile, we learn from the scientists that – like anything that’s unusual, and beautiful, and complex, and mysterious – birdsong also makes us want to learn about birdsong.
The syrinx is the how of birdsong. We’ll talk about the where in the next chapter – which leaves us with the why and the what.
Why do birds sing?
This is a very old question. Poets, as we have seen, have tended to take the anthropomorphic view: they sing, as we do, to express exultation (in the case of the skylark, for instance) or despair (in the case of the nightingale).
Ornithologists prefer to find reasons in nature, in the evolutionary history of the species. Singing must have benefits – must, that is, give the bird a better chance of producing offspring, and passing on its genes down the family line – so what we have to do to nail the why is figure out what those benefits might be.
Whole books have been written on this. David Rothenberg’s wonderful Why Birds Sing runs to 288 fascinating pages. Charles Hartshorne’s landmark 1973 work Born to Sing has 304.* For our purposes, though, a list will do. Birds call and sing:
1. To attract a mate. A song thrush’s song is an OK Cupid profile pinned to the top of a tree.
2. To say what sex you are. In species where there isn’t much difference between males and females – where, to use the jargon, there’s little sexual dimorphism – there’s a tendency for songs to be correspondingly more complex.
3. To establish and maintain a territory. This is an important one. Singing is very often a safer alternative to fighting with rivals (‘war minus the shooting’, as Orwell said of sport).
4. To indicate that you’re ready to breed.
5. To maintain a pair-bond. I take my wife a cup of tea every morning; a female song sparrow sings to its mate. Same principle.
6. To signal changes in your domestic arrangements – whose turn it is to incubate the eggs, for instance.
7. To let your offspring know where, who and what you are. This often begins while the young are still in the egg. It works the other way round, too: the superb fairy wren of Australia teaches its young a ‘password’ song while they are still in the egg; should a cuckoo lay in a fairy wren’s nest, the newborn cuckoo won’t know the ‘password’ and will be rejected by the mother.
8. To make it clear what species you belong to (or what population of a species).
9. To hold your flock together. The honking of geese in their sky-wide skeins and the seep of redwings migrating at night are ‘contact calls’ designed to ensure that no one goes astray.
10. To intimidate enemies. Often doesn’t work.
11. To warn others that there’s a predator in the vicinity. Think of a blackbird’s runaway chupchup-CHUPCHUP or the blue tit’s rising rattlesnake churr.
12. To practise. To sing well, you have to put in the hours. ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ asks the old joke. ‘Practise!’ Same here, but substitute ‘How do you get to perpetuate your genetic material?’
Do birds ever sing because they’re happy? That really depends on what you mean by ‘happy’. Charles Hartshorne suggests that ‘animals find their chief pleasure in their essential activities’. All that means, really, is that birds like being birds. I can go along with that, I think. Put it this way: it’s not that they sing because they’re happy, and it’s not even that singing makes them happy – I think that perhaps the singing is the happiness, and the happiness is the singing. Which might mean something or nothing.
This, anyway, is a relatively modern conversation to be having. In the earliest days of ornithology we never gave much thought to the why of the natural world, because we were always too busy figuring out the what.
For much of our history as a species, we learned about birds because we lived among them. Knowing about nature was how we stayed alive. Which birds were good to eat? How could we catch them? Where could we find birds’ eggs? Could birds’ calls warn us about danger? Sometimes the information we gleaned from birds was even more arcane: the Borana Oromo people of northern Kenya, for instance, learned to find the nests of wild honeybees by studying the movements of a songbird known as the honeyguide.
This model stayed pretty much the same for a good while. Asking ‘why’ wasn’t really a part of natural history. Birds just did what they did; they’d simply been made that way. If they sounded happy, then they were happy, like characters in a children’s story. Or perhaps they sang to please us – it was for us, after all, that the world had been created.
And, for most of human history, our attempts to answer the question of why songbirds sing have tended to circle back, one way or another, to happiness. And we’re not just talking about the proto-naturalists of the ancient world here, or even just the fowlers, bird-catchers and ‘natural philosophers’ of the Middle Ages. As late as 1836, a scholarly article in The Magazine of Natural History eventually resorts to the conclusion that spring weather (a blue sky, balmy air, ‘a lovely fragrance wafted by gentle zephyrs’) is all it takes – ‘all is admirably calculated to infuse delight into the mind’ – and so the birds, thus delighted, start to sing, like a carefree gentleman as he takes off his socks, rolls up his trouser cuffs and settles himself in his deckchair on the first day of his summer holidays. It’s not, to say the least, a very scientific reading of the facts; it gives us an idea of how little progress had been made by that point in the field of bird behaviour.
There were one or two exceptions (there generally are). Gilbert White, the all-seeing parson of Selborne, was one: he and his correspondent Daines Barrington agreed (correctly) that birds sing more through rivalry with other males than in an attempt to ‘charm’ females. In the early nineteenth century, George Montagu, a forensically observant soldier-turned-country gent who, after White, has the best claim to be the founding father of British ornithology,* concluded (also correctly) that singing males were not trying to seduce but to advertise – less a serenade, more a yell of ‘Come and get it’. ‘Their business in the spring’, he wrote, ‘is to perch on some conspicuous spot breathing out their full and amorous notes, which, by instinct, the female knows, and repairs to the spot to choose her mate.’
Not too long afterwards, of course, Darwin and The Origin of Species came along; ‘why?’ stopped being a pointless question to ask about birds, and started being an incredibly complicated one. After Darwin, it became clear that seeking the causes of birds’ behaviour – and of everyone else’s behaviour, come to that – would carry us deep into evolutionary history. Eventually, the question evolved to become a whole field of study: ethology. From the 1930s onwards, ethologists like Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz began to fill in some of the detail on ‘why’, and we began to understand birdsong not simply as an avian version of ‘tra-la-la’ or ‘zip-a-dee-doodah’ but as a code and a language, in which birds spoke of fear, rivalry, anger, lust and family. And perhaps happiness, too, who knows.
That leaves us with the ‘what’.
What is birdsong? What, exactly, specifically, does a blackbird sound like? We know it when we hear it, of course – but then it’s gone, dissolved in sky and lost for ever. Birdsong is a wildly unstable element; it has a shorter half-life than carbon-10. If we want to study it – and of course we do, because we’re only human, and curiosity, no less than wonder, is one of our weaknesses – we need to freeze it.
It’s notoriously difficult to describe birdsong with any sort of consistency. In the early part of the twentieth century, ornithologists devised various methods of transcription, of getting the eccentric music of songbirds down on paper.
In the US, Aretas A. Saunders was an early pioneer. Saunders was an obsessive data-gatherer, a compulsive observer of birds (and plants, and insects, and mammals). He wasn’t just a box-ticker; he didn’t just want to know, say, what song a Swainson’s warbler sings – he also needed to understand how the bird and its song fitted in with all the other birds, bird songs, insects and animals that shared its habitat.
In 1915, Saunders presented a new technique whereby a song could be mapped on x and y axes according to its pitch, duration and intensity (a fourth variable, sound quality, by which he presumably meant tone or timbre, was considered ‘baffling and difficult to describe with accuracy’, and so was left out). It was a ramshackle approach that relied on a good ear for music (the y axis was simply the GABCDEF musical scale). Saunders himself was aware of its limitations – he described the complicated process of determining a song’s intensity as ‘destined to try to the utmost the patience and perseverance of the future student of bird song’ – but defended himself by popping open a philosophical can of worms: ‘Can a bird song be described accurately and exactly? No, nor can anything else.’
That’s true, up to a point: there are always levels of detail, depths of zoom, that our methods are inadequate to describe. But still, it was possible to look at one of Saunders’ charts and think ‘surely we can do better than this’.
The debate that followed – conducted largely in the pages of such august organs as The Auk, the journal of the American Ornithologists’ Union – was vigorous, learned and ultimately doomed. In 1931, the future of birdsong study came rumbling into view on the back of a flatbed truck.
Stewart Park in the city of Ithaca, NY, was once the indigenous village of Neodakheat; since then, it has been Military Lot 88, a school athletics venue and a film studio (silent-moviemakers Ted and Leo Wharton set numerous three-reel melodramas against the park’s wild backdrops); in the mid-twentieth century it had a funfair, carousel, zoo, vaudeville theatre and all. The park still sprawls over forty acres of land beside the glacial Cayuga Lake. Stand in the park in late spring with your ears open, and you’ve a good chance of hearing palm warbler (tsink), house wren (dirrd), northern waterthrush (spwik), blackpoll warbler (tzzz), rose-breasted grosbeak (peek), yellow-rumped warbler (see-seet-seet-seet-seet-trrrr), blue-grey gnatcatcher (pwee), song sparrow (sweet), warbling vireo (git, vidervidi), and white-crowned sparrow (pink).
It was these birds – or their far-off forefathers – that, in 1929, made history.
Arthur Augustus Allen – known as ‘Doc’ – was the first professor of ornithology in the United States. He was a storyteller, a writer, a lecturer and a teacher as well as a scientist. He’d discovered fifteen new tropical bird species before his thirtieth birthday. In 1924, he found a family of ivory-billed woodpeckers – widely feared extinct* – nesting in Florida. Another ornithologist, James Tanner, wrote that ‘all the ivory-bills that I have ever seen I located first by hearing them call and then going to them’, so it seems likely that Allen, too, was alerted to the bird’s presence by its call (a nasal, tooting kent, sometimes likened to a child’s tin trumpet) – all the more so as Allen had a phenomenal ear for birdsong.
But it was becoming obvious that the human ear – even one as refined as Allen’s – was no longer adequate as a tool for the scientific study of birdsong. One way or another, we had to figure out how to preserve birdsong – to set it down in a permanent record.
So in the spring of 1929, Allen and his team at Cornell University set up camp in Stewart Park.* Using modified motion-picture gear from the Fox Movietone studio, carried on the back of a flatbed, they recorded the house wren, rose-breasted grosbeak and song sparrow (to recap, that’s a dirrd, a peek and a sweet) on synchronised movie and audio film. This, remember, was only two years after the release of Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, the first full-length motion picture to use synchronised sound – and in the same park where Lionel Barrymore and Irene Castle had hammed it up for the Wharton brothers’ silent three-reelers. These recordings formed the basis of Cornell’s Macaulay Library, which is now home to more than 175,000 individual recordings of birds, mammals and insects. Allen would surely have been staggered – and delighted.
‘He was dedicated to educating the public and I think he’d be thrilled with the outreach that’s possible today,’ Macaulay Library archive audio curator Greg Budney commented on the 100th anniversary of that day in Stewart Park. ‘With the click of a mouse, anyone can access sounds in the archive. From locations ranging from a field in the Midwestern US to deep within the Amazon basin, to the Himalayas, the Macaulay Library offers a fantastic window into nature, open to everyone.’
Allen’s weren’t, though, the first recordings ever made of bird vocalisations. After all, sound recording had been around since 1857 (when Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created a ‘phonautograph’ that translated sounds into patterns scratched in soot). In 1877, Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinder introduced the concept of playback, not only recording but recreating the sounds it heard. I can’t imagine how magical that must have seemed (no matter how crackly, or lo-fi, or indistinct the sounds) – and I can’t imagine how joyful the eight-year-old Ludwig Koch must have felt when, on returning home from a trip to Frankfurt Zoo in 1889, he played back the wax-cylinder recording he had made on his Edison machine – a gift from his father. What he would have heard, muffled, oddly distant and softened by static, was the song of a white-rumped shama, an Indian songbird related to the flycatchers and prized for its thrush-like song. In south Asia, shamas are often kept as cage birds; here, spilling from the brass trumpet of the Edison Home Phonograph, was an abstracted version of the same thing – birdsong in the drawing room, automated and on demand. Little Ludwig’s shama-song was the first ever recording of a singing bird.
The technology advanced, as technology does; milestone followed milestone. Cherry Kearton recorded the first wild birds – a song thrush and a nightingale – on an Edison at Kenley, in the green belt south of Croydon, in 1900; another nightingale was ‘bagged’ by Karl Reich in Berlin, and released as the first gramophone record of a singing bird in 1910; an emperor penguin – not known for its song, but capable of a resonant and far-carrying kazoo effect – was recorded via radio transmission in 1934; the first stereophonic birdsong record, Sten Wahlström and Sven Åberg’s Birds in Stereo, hit the shelves in 1963 (the idea of buying birdsong on LP doesn’t seem so quaint when you consider the vast popularity of Radio 4’s daily ‘Tweet of the Day’ birdsong broadcasts).
Recorded birdsong, though, has the same problem as live birdsong. You can’t put it in a book or a scientific paper. You can’t study it in a library reading room. You can’t corral it into graphs, charts and scales. Even on vinyl or magnetic tape, it’s wild and unwieldy. To study birdsong properly – to really get into its workings, and figure out all its moving parts – we needed to get birdsong down on paper. With all due respect to A.A. Saunders and his x and y axes, though, there still wasn’t a strictly objective way of translating the songs the scientists could hear into something they could see.
Fortunately, the government was working on it.
There’s a lot in the history of birdsong science that feels odd and incongruous. Those tiny electrode-controlled syrinxes, singing and dancing for the cameras; the heavy rig of early Hollywood shipped into a public park to grab a snatch of wren-song. Strangest of all, though, is the cutting-edge knowhow of the US military-industrial complex being put to use in recording a robin’s song.
During the Second World War, code-breaking was a life-and-death priority for Allied military intelligence. Coded comms often made use of shifts in sound frequency and timing; a technology that could analyse these kinds of patterns would give the Allies a vital edge. Bell Telephone Laboratories was put on the case.
Working in the shadows, Bell – a firm with its origins in the earliest days of telecoms technology, and by this point something of a genius factory – began to develop devices designed for ‘the visual translation of sound’. The military applications of these devices went beyond code-breaking; accurate analysis of sound signatures could also be used to ID the propellers of ships and planes.
As early as 1943, though, this top-secret technology was already being put to non-military uses. Bell’s ‘sound spectrograph’ or ‘sonagraph’ was made available as a tool for helping the deaf to recognise sounds – when answering the phone, for example, or listening to the wireless – and to learn to speak. The researchers were also, it seems, alert to the potential of the sonagraph in studying birdsong; a 1944 paper from Bell Labs featured ‘sonograms’ not only of human speech but of the calls of the northern cardinal, northern mockingbird, brown thrasher, eastern screech-owl and American robin.
Sonograms, the author of the paper wrote, would make it possible to ‘analyze, compare, and classify the songs of birds, and, of even more importance . . . to write about such studies with meaningful sound pictures that should enable others to understand the results’. This was birdsong, translated – and not into the pentameter of poetry, but into a language scientists could understand.
I’m looking at a sonogram of a blackcap song right now; it was recorded in Ryedale, North Yorkshire, last summer, and I found it on the xeno-canto song-recording website.* It’s a graph, essentially – it’s not a million miles away from A.A. Saunders’ version, except that the y axis shows not musical notes but frequency, measured in kilohertz. The data, the meat of the graph, is quite different, though: where Saunders drew tidy lines, the sonogram is a canvas of smudges, grey on white, as if someone had taken a soft-leaded pencil and wiped it sidelong over the page.
It has, like those quivering syrinxes, an unusual sort of beauty. It looks like something from the last days of Impressionist painting – but that’s misleading, because there’s nothing impressionistic about it: this is hard data, clear-cut, for all its apparent smudginess. What looks like a faded thumbprint on the chart is a lode of technical information. Just as a trained musician can ‘read’ the notes in a musical score – perhaps hearing the music in her head as she goes along – an expert in bioacoustics can look at a sonogram and see birdsong. The important difference is that a musical score is an instruction, a representation of what should be; a sonogram is a recording – it shows you what is.
Or what was. Once, years ago, I was taken to a fancy restaurant where, as an after-dinner gimmick, the waiter offered each of us a choice of cognacs from the year of our birth. Thanks to xeno-canto, I can give myself a similar sort of treat now. I sort the library of blackcap recordings by date, scroll back through the decades – and I’m in luck. 1978. April, 1978, five months before I was born, but near enough. It was recorded by a man called Patrik Åberg in Illmitz, Austria – a national park, up against the Hungarian border. The sonogram looks much like the others: a parade of rippling ink-smudges, spiking up and down between 3 and 15 kilohertz. It looks like a collection of pale-grey feathers laid out on a sheet of paper. I play the recording, and it’s perfect. It’s as exuberant and eccentric a blackcap as I ever heard, breathless, reckless, full of squeaks and raspberries, roller-coastering through the frequencies. It’s nice to know that thirty-nine years ago, in the year I fell into the world – the year of three Popes, of the first test-tube baby, of Superman in the cinemas; the year Ian Botham hit 108 and took 8–34 in a single innings against Pakistan; the year of Parallel Lines and All Mod Cons and Darkness on the Edge of Town – well, it’s nice to know that blackcaps then sounded like blackcaps now. It doesn’t mean much, but it’s nice anyway.
‘That was a chack,’ Graham says, pointing at a holly-bush on our left. ‘That’ – now he jabs his finger at a young elder by the stream, on our right – ‘was a tack.’
We’re in woodland to the north of Leeds, in the valley between the suburbs of Gledhow and Chapel Allerton. It’s mid-afternoon, and it’s November; birdsong-wise, this is the dead zone, but here we are anyway. I met Graham Shortt to talk about birdsong – specifically, about Graham’s remarkable ear for birdsong – and it seemed silly, despite the season and the drizzle, not to at least try to put him to the test.
I had heard from local birders that Graham was a ‘whiz’ at ID-ing birds by their songs and calls. Over email, he concedes that his abilities probably place him in the top 0.3 per cent of UK birdwatchers (actually he puts it more modestly than that: ‘Somewhere in the top 1,000,’ he says, but I run the numbers later). We meet for a drink in his local. I want to talk to Graham because I want to know how it works: how it’s possible to find a note in a fog of ambient noise and think – no, know – ‘that’s a treecreeper’ or ‘that’s a bullfinch’ or whatever it might be. I’ve seen it done many times, and it looks like witchcraft to me.*
He’s a big man, Graham, tall and wide, maybe five or six years older than me (I’m always happier when experts are older than me) – he’s easy to spot when he walks into the pub. We take a table in a corner, and I ask him to tell me the story of his birding life. He’s articulate and philosophical; he has a decent sense of proportion about his obsessive streak, and, it quickly becomes clear, a frighteningly comprehensive knowledge of birds.
In between birding anecdotes (‘Brett Richards† once picked up a snow bunting from three miles out’) and idiosyncratic tips on bird ID (‘You’ve read Of Mice and Men? The golden plover is George, the grey plover is Lenny’), Graham gives me an expert’s-eye-view – or ear-view, I suppose – of the world of birdsong.
‘Most people have the idea that bird songs are stereotypes,’ he says. ‘But you have to learn the voice.’ It’s not about the notes and rhythm, he argues; it’s all about tone. That’s right – the elusive property that the keen-eared A.A. Saunders found ‘baffling and difficult to describe’. So that’s helpful.
This approach puts Graham at odds with the received wisdom. Take the songs of the garden warbler and blackcap, for example: two wayward babbles, often said to be very much alike. ‘They’re nothing like each other,’ Graham says, in a tone of exasperation. One ‘bubbles’, he says, and the other ‘flutes’. But then he has difficulties of his own: the sedge warbler and reed warbler aren’t often singled out as ‘problem’ species in terms of song ID (the reed warbler’s is ‘more even, less varied and lower pitched’, according to my guidebook*), but for Graham they’re tough to tell apart.
He tells me that he learned his birdsong studiously, by rote, from CDs he played in the car (he reckons that he clocked over a thousand miles in his first six months of serious birding). For all that, his seems to be a hugely personal way of responding to birdsong. It’s about getting to know the birds – and not only the birds, but the landscapes in which they live. The where and when of birdsong can be as important as the what ; stripped of context, Graham says, some songs can be near impossible to identify.
The chack and the tack, by the way, were a wren and a robin. I’d noticed that, in the autumn, robins start breaking out the wren impersonations, tutting – chack-ing – very like wrens. No no no, Graham said; they’re quite different. I’m afraid I forget, now, which one went chack and which one went tack.
Also in the woods, as we passed a small lake pitted by raindrops and peopled with idling white gulls, Graham was sure he heard a Mediterranean gull yelp amid the general chatter of their black-headed cousins. Later, I’ll listen to recordings of the two species online; I can hear the difference (the Med gull’s is higher-pitched, and more abrupt; the black-headed gull emits a strangulated seagull yell – there’s a reason why the black-headed gull in Watership Down was called Kehaar), but the idea of me ID-ing the two by ear in the field – over the noise of the weather, the other birds, our conversation and the monotone of the traffic on the nearby Gledhow Valley Road – is laughable.
For an expert like Graham, I realise, a bird’s song or call is as much a part of the bird’s identity as its appearance, while ID-ing that song is itself tied into multiple observations – perhaps made only half-consciously – about the season, the location, the landscape and a good deal else.
Earlier, Graham had quoted a friend who described birdwatching as ‘a heuristic and compass to the natural world’. Listening to birdsong is the same. It’s a means of orientation; it’s embedded in habitat, landscape and place.
Before we part, Graham tells me another birdsong story.
He was birding in Gambia, he says – that riverine strip of west Africa, surrounded by Senegal and the sea. It’s well known as a birder’s paradise; a trip with a knowledgeable guide might yield bearded barbet, beautiful sunbird, bronze mannikin, blue-breasted kingfisher and sundry other tempting exotica.
It was here that Graham heard a birdsong he remembers more fondly than any other: ‘a perfect descending scale’, coming from a treetop. It was a willow warbler, in Africa on migration. They’re ten-a-penny in England between March and August.
‘It was like meeting an old friend,’ Graham says. Like, I suppose, coming home.
* Andrew Whitehouse, curator of the ‘Listening to Birds’ website that I mentioned in the Prologue, prefaces the site’s ‘nightingales’ with the splendid comment: ‘In some cases these might not have been “real nightingales” but maybe that depends on what you think a “real nightingale” is.’
* Pronounced ‘sirrinks’, not ‘sy-rinks’.
* Pedants will tell you that the correct plural is ‘syringes’. Ignore them.
* This, too, is a book worth looking up. There’s much to enjoy in Hartshorne’s blithe certainty that the beauty of a song can be scientifically measured: one diagram shows a scale running from ‘beautiful’ to ‘hopelessly superficial’, while Hartshorne’s all-time worldwide ‘Best 194 Songbirds’ list is full of interest (the superb lyrebird tops the chart with a score of 999.669:48).
* Montagu ID’d the first ‘Montagu’s harrier’ – a bird of prey that breeds in our fens and fields and winters in the scrub of the Sahel – in the summer of 1803. He also established that the bird known as a ‘Greenwich sandpiper’ was in fact only a ruff in winter plumage, while the ‘ash-coloured sandpiper’ was actually a knot.
A rock-pooler as well as a birdwatcher, he is commemorated not only by Montagu’s harrier but by Montagu’s blenny, Montagu’s ray, Montagu’s sucker and Montagu’s sea snail.
* And today, sadly, almost certainly extinct: despite a flurry of excitement over some possible sightings in Arkansas and Florida in 2005, the American Birding Association classifies the bird as ‘definitely or probably extinct’.
* Allen’s team was soon joined by another major figure in the history of recording, Albert R. Brand, notable for having made a fortune on Wall Street before the age of thirty and bailing out to work with Allen just months before the Crash of 1929.
* www.xeno-canto.org. At the time of writing, xeno-canto has 3,622 different recordings of blackcap songs and calls. If you wanted, you could spend just over forty-three hours and fifty minutes listening to blackcaps.
* Sometimes it makes me feel like my great-uncle Frank, who, in the days of the ‘Magic Eye’ puzzle craze, flatly refused to believe that people were seeing what they said they were seeing, and concluded that we were all simply making it up.
† Legendary east-coast twitcher who admits to having scheduled his wedding in March ‘because it’s the worst month for birding and I was least likely to have to postpone the event’.
* Gilbert White, incidentally, thought that the sedge warbler was ‘a splendid fellow’: if he could be ‘persuaded not to sing in such a hurry’, he wrote, ‘he would be an elegant songster’.