‘However strangers sound such words, That’s how we sound them here.’
—Thomas Hardy, ‘The Spring Call’ (1909)
We were in one of the Paris railway stations, I forget which one – it was sprawling, grey and complicated, too many people, not enough places to sit – Gare du Nord, Gare Montparnasse? I don’t remember. But I do remember the sparrows.
While my wife fetched coffee I sat on my suitcase and watched them busy beneath a line of metal benches. A sparse, grubby shingle of pastry flakes, Metro tickets and cigarette ends had accumulated there. City sparrows are used to having to find their calories in unpromising places. These were mostly hens, Parisiennes, grey-to-brown and undistinguished; a good fit for the concrete and dull steel of Gare du whatever-it-was. They made me wonder how long it had been since I’d seen English sparrows behaving like this: mucky and bustling, streetwise and on the scrounge. They made me think of home.
House-sparrow numbers in Britain have fallen catastrophically during my lifetime.* No one’s sure why: it might be disease or air pollution, it might be predation by cats or sparrowhawks, it might be that they have nowhere to nest, it might be any combination of these factors. Nowadays, they aren’t exactly uncommon – you’ll often experience them as a vast noise of chirruping, a Commons debate wound up in pitch to a half-dozen kilohertz, coming from inside a beech hedge – but when I was a boy in the West Yorkshire suburbs, perhaps twenty-five years ago, they were more than common, they were everywhere. They maintained a knockabout mob rule over our bird table and got up to all sorts in our guttering; in the streets and shopping precincts, they scavenged and scrapped and begged and generally did exactly what these French sparrows (piafs, as they’re known) were doing in the railway station.
Watching the sparrows made me think of home, but what home, exactly? England? Wakefield? My mum and dad’s 1970s semi in leafy WF4? And just as important as ‘where’ was ‘when’. As I sat on my suitcase on that Paris platform, en route to northern Spain, was I thinking of the England I’d just left behind, or was I thinking of the past (a quite different foreign country, as L.P. Hartley wrote, where the sparrows, just as much as us, do things differently)?
From Paris Gare du Nord – leaving the sparrows behind – you can take a train due north, to Amiens or Abbeville, and in barely more than an hour find yourself deep in the green countryside of Picardy and Arras and French Flanders. This is a landscape of wounds. A century ago, these were the killing fields of the First World War; the Western Front, a wavering stripe of brutally broken land, ran south-east across northern France from the coast of Belgium to the Swiss border. Countless men – at least four million – died here. Now, it’s a land of memorials (Thiepval, Vimy, Loos, Villers-Bretonneux, Neuve-Chapelle) and cemeteries (Étaples, Vermelles, Thiaucourt-Regniéville, Pheasant Wood).
It’s also now, as it was then, a land of beech woodland, hedgerow and cultivated pasture – what further west they call bocage – which means that it’s a land of birdsong.
‘It has often seemed to me that gunfire makes birds sing,’ wrote Stuart Cloete, who served for four years on the Western Front. ‘Or is it just that the paradox is so great that one never forgets it and always associates the two?’
To English soldiers far from home – and I can only imagine how desperately, hopelessly far the 140-odd miles between Flanders and Dover must have seemed to the young men at the Front – there was a particular poignancy to the birdsong of the battlefield.
‘Every morning when I was in the front-line trenches I used to hear the larks singing soon after we stood-to about dawn,’ wrote Major F. H. Keeling. ‘But those wretched larks made me more sad than anything else out here. Their songs are so closely associated in my mind with peaceful summer days in gardens or pleasant landscapes in Blighty.’
The pastures might have been torn apart by trench-work and shell-fire – what the geographer Joseph Hupy called ‘bombturbation’ – but the skylarks remained.
So too, in the shattered woodlands, did the nightingales. In his landmark cultural study of the war, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell noted that ‘Flanders and Picardy abounded in the two species long the property of symbolic literary pastoral – larks and nightingales. The one now became associated with stand-to at dawn, the other with stand-to at evening. (Sometimes it is really hard to shake off the conviction that this war has been written by someone.)’
There isn’t anything especially English about these species. England sits right on the north-western brink of the nightingale’s natural range (even the nightingales that do come here treat us a summer time-share, and spend seven months of the year at their African wintering grounds). You might hear the song of a skylark (or, rather, a Feldlerche) in the chalk grasslands of Germany’s Rhineland or on the plains of Extremadura (where it’s an alondra). In one sense, there was no reason why the ‘wretched larks’ of the Western Front should have made poor Major Keeling ache for Blighty. Of course, sounds, like smells and flavours, can be powerfully evocative (if I sniff the glossy solvent-smelling pages of my first birdwatcher’s field guide, I’m eight years old again); of course, a poignant Proustian rush can strike any of us at any time, often from the most unexpected quarters. But why the skylarks in particular – any more than, say, a cumulus cloud or a blade of grass or the taste of fresh bread?
It’s a fair guess that Keeling had read about Shelley’s ‘blithe spirit’, his ‘high-born maiden in a palace-tower’ and her ‘music sweet as love’ (never mind that Shelley’s was an Italian skylark); we can suppose that he’d read Meredith hymning the ‘simple singing of delight, shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d’, or maybe Christina Rossetti recalling ‘one sunny morn’ when ‘the earth was green, the sky was blue’ and she saw and heard ‘a skylark hang between the two, a singing speck above the corn’. It seems less likely that he would have read, or in any case remembered, the German poet J.W. von Goethe’s ‘when aimless skylarks jubilate above us in the spacious blue’ or Joseph von Eichendorff’s ‘Just two skylarks upwards soar, day-dreaming in the scent’.
Shelley and Meredith and Rossetti and the rest had planted an English flag in the skylark’s song. You didn’t have to be a raving jingo – indeed Keeling, a well-to-do socialist who rejected the frothing anti-Germanism of some of his contemporaries, was certainly no such thing – to hear something English in the sound of the bird.
There’s a disconnect – a gulf, sometimes – between what we think is British and what is actually, physically, geographically British. This applies as much in birdsong as anywhere else.
In reality, there is only one quintessentially British bird song. It’s a trilling, high-pitched twitter that you might hear coming from the canopy of a pine forest in Highland Scotland; it’s the song of the Scottish crossbill, Loxia scotica, and it’s a song you’ll hear nowhere else in the world.
The Scottish crossbill is a burly forest finch with a twisted beak strikingly adapted for prising seeds out of pine cones. It’s Britain’s only endemic bird species – that is, the only species unique to us. But to say so is to open up a taxonomic can of worms.
Not so long ago, the red grouse, Lagopus lagopus scotica, was considered endemic to the UK. It’s a bird that perhaps more than any other has shaped our country (quite literally: acres of heather moorland have been tailored – cropped, burnt, fenced off and deforested – to suit the grouse, or rather to suit the people who like to shoot the grouse). Its look – red wattle, plumage rich as fruitcake, furry white spats – is iconic, and so is its sound: the grouse’s throaty cluck, calling go back, go back, go back across the black peat and heather bents, is one of the keynote voices of our upland biophony.
But the taxonomists – the biologists whose job it is to identify, label, and sort life on earth into manageable hierarchies of phylum, order, genus, species and so on – took the red grouse away from us. Our grouse, it turned out, was really not much different from their grouse; the ‘willow grouse’ or ‘willow ptarmigan’ of North America, China, Russia and most of Europe was, taxonomically speaking, pretty much the same bird as our red grouse; our bird was not a species in its own right, but only a subspecies. That same spine-tingling go back clatter can be heard across the better part of the northern hemisphere.
Taxonomists, however, are even-handed tyrants, who giveth just as well as they taketh away. In August 2006, the Scottish crossbill, previously lumped in with the far more widely travelled common or red crossbill, was declared a species – an endemic British species.* What differentiated Loxia scotica from Loxia curvirostra (or for that matter the bulkier parrot crossbill, Loxia pytyopsittacus)? It was partly the bird’s physiology, and partly its manner of flight – but most of all, it was the Scottish crossbill’s call. Loxia scotica speaks with a Scottish accent.
Mind you, it takes a well-trained ear, an ornithological Henry Higgins, to hear the difference. Comparing recordings of the two species’ ‘excitement calls’ I found online, I’d say that the Scottish crossbill’s repeated chup, chup has a lower pitch and mellower tone than that of its common cousin (later, I’m pleased to find that the RSPB’s ID guide agrees with me, contrasting the ‘ ‘‘chup chup” call with a fluty quality’ of scotica with the ‘loud “chip chip” call’ of curvirostra and the ‘ ‘‘kop-kop” and “choop choop’’ ’ calls of pytyopsittacus). But is all this really enough to make scotica a species apart? I say ‘grass’ with a flat ‘a’ and pronounce ‘scone’ to rhyme with ‘bone’ – am I a different species to my friend Ben, who is from Suffolk and says ‘grarse’ and ‘scon’? RSPB studies found that, although there were no notable genetic differences between Scotland’s scotica and curvirostra, the birds maintained independent populations – that is, individuals of one type never bred with individuals of the other. But then, Ben and I have never interbred either.
The divergent forks you see in taxonomic charts – where the vertebrates went this way and the invertebrates went that way, or whatever – always seem so decisive. In reality, speciation is a muddy and confounding business.
Our sole endemic species is a dapper little finch, and I wish it all the best, but even the Scottish crossbill’s most ardent admirers would have to admit that the bird isn’t packing much in the way of star quality. I don’t feel a surge of teary patriotism when I examine the sonograms of scotica’s excitement call. The Scottish crossbill is uniquely Highland, uniquely Scottish, and uniquely British – it has carved a niche deep in one of our ancient landscapes, but it doesn’t feel more Scottish than, say, the osprey (a summer migrant from Africa) or more British than the red grouse (common as muck from Alaska to Archangelsk). This seems very unfair on the Scottish crossbill.
Biology – the collected happenstances of birth, breeding and evolution – isn’t enough. Publicity is what counts. Think of it as a PR campaign: with Keats and Coleridge manning the nightingale hype-machine and Meredith, Rossetti and Vaughan Williams puffing the skylark for all they were worth, how could these birds and their songs fail to make an impression on our national cultural consciousness? Notions of Britishness have seldom made much sense; they don’t have to make much sense to make an impact. We’ve never really cared about how foreign our British kings and queens have been – and as a rule they’ve been more foreign than not – so why would it be different for nightingales?
Britishness is whatever you want it to be. Sparrows chittering in the gutters. Swifts, just in from the Congo, screaming thinly through the twilight. The twanging, high-pitched pyah of an Indian peacock on the lawn.
In northern England, a chaffinch is sometimes called a ‘spink’. In the Midlands, it can be a ‘pie finch’; in Scotland it goes by ‘shielyfaw’ or ‘shilfy’ or ‘britchie’; the Cornish called it an ‘apple bird’, and in Northumberland it might be a ‘shavey’.
But these things work both ways. Chaffinches have dialects of their own.
When I was young, and the house sparrow was king, there weren’t many chaffinches to be seen round our way. When one did turn up, in and among the beige-and-grey blitzes of sparrows, it was distinguished by more than its white double wing-bar; a chaffinch – even a female, dressed for comfort in buffs and browns – has the bearing of an aristocrat. Its forehead is high and its beak – the grey of very soft pencil-lead – has a neat, just-sharpened point; the male’s call of spink is peremptory. I liked chaffinches. But I never noticed their song.
As with so many things in life, I read about it before I got round to experiencing it for myself. I’d picked up a book about the polar explorer Edward Wilson in a second-hand bookshop somewhere. Wilson, who died with Captain Scott on their return journey from the South Pole in 1912, was a gifted artist and a distinguished ornithologist (when he perished in Antarctica he was midway through a major study of disease in British grouse). His wildlife illustrations drew on more than a keen eye for visual detail; rather, he sought to depict ‘the idea of an animal’: ‘When one knows the animal well enough – little bits from years and years ago when one first saw the animal in a hedgerow – it’s all there ready to come to hand when at last you say, now I am going to paint it.’ There’s no doubt that, for Wilson, songs and calls were bundled with form, colour, character and habitat in his conception of a bird’s identity. He saw birds in all their dimensions; he painted, in the deepest, richest sense, from life.
Diaries from Wilson’s youth in the countryside outside Cheltenham include a series of mnemonics for recognising the songs of the local birds: just a wee little bit is the blue tit, easy, easy, ease a bit, easily with it a bit the treecreeper; a starling goes kiou, kiou, kiou-kiou, kiou, kiou, kiokio, kiokio – ‘like the jackdaw – then 3 single blackbird’s notes, full mellow and contented; then a long dribbling rattle with its beak’. I can’t help wondering if Wilson replayed these songs to himself as he slogged across songless Antarctica, a decade later; I wonder if he ever heard in his head the note of the grouse: go back, go back.
This, anyway, was where I first read that the chaffinch’s song has the cadence of a fast bowler in cricket running up to the crease and delivering the ball.
It probably wasn’t Wilson’s invention; the chances are that he lifted it from the popular nature writer William Warde Fowler (who noted further that on some occasions, early in the singing season, the chaffinch seems rusty: he is liable to get to the wicket and stop, and takes a few days of practice to ‘deliver the ball’). It caught my attention, in any case. I’d always known that there are few things in life that can’t be improved by a clever cricketing analogy; if anything could help me get a hand to the flashing top-edged half-chance that birdsong seemed to me to be, cricket could.
Chaffinches start singing as early as February (well before the beginning of the cricket season). My family rented a holiday cottage in Hawkshead, near Windermere, one April. By that time the local chaffinches had settled into their groove and were singing incessantly* in the Lakeland pines and birches. I listened for the sound of the fast bowler – and, to my surprise, I heard it. The accelerating run to the wicket, pacey and staccato (it’s a short run, around eight paces – Pakistan legend Wasim Akram bowled off about the same); a little flourish or convolution of notes as the bowler gathers in the ball and enters his delivery stride; then pew, the brief whistle of the ball flying from the bowler’s hand.
Just like that, I could recognise a chaffinch’s song – or, to be more precise, I could recognise a Cumbrian chaffinch’s song.
It’s long been believed that chaffinches in different parts of the country sing their songs a little differently. In the days of bird-catching (which we’ll talk more about in Chapter 5), skilled catchers were supposed to be able to tell a Kent chaffinch from an Essex chaffinch by slight variations in their song’s final phrase: in Essex, the birds sang chuckwado, while on the opposite bank of the Thames, in Kent, it was kiss-me-dear.
But this was just the tip of the iceberg. In the early 1950s, English botany graduate student Peter Marler was surveying potential nature-reserve sites in Scotland when he realised that the songs of the chaffinches around him were changing as he travelled from valley to valley. He observed the same thing in the Lake District, while taking mud samples (perhaps he heard the forefathers of my Hawkshead chaffinches). His next job took him to the Azores, an archipelago some 350 miles off the coast of Portugal; in fact, he wangled the job mainly because he knew there were chaffinches there, and these, too, had their own song variations.
Working in his spare time, Marler – who would go on to be a monumental figure in the field of birdsong study – compiled the first ‘dialect maps’ for chaffinches (or indeed for any songbird). Intriguingly, the findings suggested that the songs a chaffinch sings aren’t genetically hardwired, any more than that flat ‘a’ of mine is determined by my DNA; rather, a young chaffinch learns its songs from its father.
The comparisons with human dialect break down, however, because chaffinch song is even more varied than human speech. A 1982 study of chaffinches in Orkney, Sussex and Cheshire concluded that the variations within a geographical area were as great as the variations between different areas; it was not possible, the researchers found, to distinguish between Orkney, Sussex and Cheshire chaffinches as readily as you might tell a Scottish accent from an English one. There are two reasons for this. One is that young chaffinches aren’t flawless recording machines; they’ll often learn a song imperfectly, bodging their father’s phrases, which means that the song – like many an old ballad – is warped and altered as it passes down the family line. The other is that chaffinches move about: a bird that learns a song in one location will very likely wind up singing it in another. (Actually, something similar happens in human accents: the great linguist David Crystal once told me that, far from making the way we speak more homogeneous, our modern tendency to drift away from our home towns has created more variation; it’s just a lot harder now than it once was to identify an individual accent. ‘It’s very diffi-cult now to do a Henry Higgins,’ he said.) Even the most intensively diversified English dialects – think, perhaps, of the highly local ‘Pitmatic’ dialects once spoken in the close-knit mining villages of the north-east, where the difference between one dialect and another might be a matter of a mere half-mile – can’t compete with our chaffinches where variation is concerned.
But there are birds that maintain clear-cut local dialects. One, the white-crowned sparrow, is native to the US (Peter Marler called it ‘the chaffinch of the west’). Another, however, is a familiar sight here in the UK. The redwing, Turdus iliacus, is a favourite species of mine, and a regular on my local patch, but I’ve never heard one sing. That’s because they only come to us in the winter, and save their songs for the woodlands of Norway and Sweden – their ‘home’, if ever a migratory bird can be said to have a home.
The redwing in Britain is a handsome character, neat and compact with a clotted-cream eyestripe and rust-red flanks, but it can cut a rather sorry figure when the frost begins to bite. It arrives from the far north in October, knackered and hungry; you’ll often hear its faintly hoarse contact-call of seep, seep, seep from high overhead (for any birder, it’s a long-awaited sign that autumn, season of migration, movement, vagrants and rarities, is finally under way). It fills up on berries and, when the berries are all gone, takes to the fields in busy, worm-hunting working-parties of perhaps fifty or sixty birds. The redwing is nordically indifferent to cold, but once the cotoneaster and rowans have been stripped it needs soft soil in order to feed; hard frosts in the late winter spell starvation. One nature writer of the last century wrote that ‘a Redwing starved to death used to be no unfrequent sight in the course of a winter’s ramble’.
It’s easy for us in Britain to see the redwing’s life as a desperate and wintry one, and to think of this dapper little thrush as a rather sad creature of bleak field and black hawthorn. Far better to follow the redwing back (in imagination or otherwise), in late spring, to its native forests; there, the identity of the redwing – not just as a species, but as an individual bird, of this copse in Krokskogen, or that beech wood in Moldemarka – is tightly bound up with its song.
I’ve listened to a recording of a redwing singing. It’s a nice noise, uncomplicated, twittery and sharply resonant. But I haven’t heard it belted out by a springtime cock-redwing from the top of a Scandinavian aspen – the Victorian naturalist W.C. Hewitson described it as ‘perched upon the summit of the highest trees, pouring forth its delightfully wild note’ – which means, really, that I haven’t heard it at all.
And I’ve only heard one redwing dialect. In Norway alone, there are thousands.
The researchers Tron and Tore Bjerke studied redwing songs in the woodlands north of Oslo in the 1980s. They found that the birds’ dialects differed distinctly – enough to be heard by the human ear – according to which territory the birds sang in; a new dialect could be heard around every sixth kilometre (Norway covers almost 400km2 in total, and most of it is home to breeding redwings). What’s more, the boundaries between territories were sharply delineated (the Bjerkes found that redwings singing close to a territorial boundary would occasionally drop into the neighbouring dialect, but that the songs remained distinct: there was no hybridisation, no redwing equivalent of ‘Franglais’ or ‘Hinglish’). Song territories persisted from one breeding season to the next, meaning that redwings returning from their wintering grounds to the south were able to find their way home with startling accuracy.
Why do redwing dialects maintain their integrity, while chaffinch dialects splinter? The main reason is that the redwing sings, as a rule, only one song; a chaffinch might sing as many as six, which provides much more scope for confusion and variation.
A Scandinavian forest full of redwings, each devotedly singing his father’s simple song: this is where birdsong and place truly interconnect. It seems a bit silly – no, it is a bit silly – to use concepts of home, family, identity and culture when you’re talking about a thrush, but it’s also silly to think that skylark vocalisations have anything to do with a nation-state, and we do it anyway. We can’t help it, it seems. These kinds of concepts – flawed, limited and human – are often, like the words of the languages we speak, the only tools we have for making sense of the world.
Rupert Marshall, a researcher at Aberystwyth University, has made a study of local ‘dialects’ in another British species, the corn bunting. It’s an increasingly scarce farmland songbird, with the look of a streaky, beefed-up sparrow and a jangling, jittery high-pitched song (Dr Marshall, who may have gone somewhat native in the course of his studies, prefers to describe it as ‘like dribbling silver, a warm babbling brook on a sunny day, a soft, gentle trinkling – a joy to behold’; I can’t agree, but I’ll give the doctor bonus points for ‘trinkling’).
Marshall writes on his project’s website that bunting dialects differ over a very small distance. (‘Rather than thinking of Liverpool and Manchester, think of one side of a street compared with the other.’) In places where the corn bunting has declined – that is, pretty much everywhere except for a handful of Scottish islands – the dialects have lost their definition or vanished altogether, resulting in what Marshall calls ‘a general mish-mash of songs’. For him, a corn bunting’s dialect is part of its identity as a species: ‘If we succeed in saving corn buntings but they no longer exhibit the behaviour for which they were once so well known’ – if they no longer sing in dialect – ‘can we truly say we have saved them? Imagine a lion that no longer roared.’
Birdsong in poetry, as we’ve seen, is often presented as a contrast to a landscape – as an event, rather than something stitched into the backcloth. In reality, it doesn’t normally work that way; in reality, birdsong normally isn’t the headline, isn’t the lead story. For most of us, most of the time, birdsong is context.
I’m not a poet. I write fiction; I tell stories, and that means that – on a small, scruffy and distinctly un-godlike scale – I build worlds. World-building, counterintuitively, is about the little things. It’s about the power of cumulative detail, rather than the star-power of stand-out showstoppers; it’s about odds and ends being built up and up and up into something rich and complex.* I like scope and scale and sweep and all those sorts of things. Maybe this reinforces my feeling that nature – hell, that life – is about the ensemble cast, rather than the A-lister; the orchestra, rather than the rock star.
In a novel, birdsong is usually background; used skilfully, though – like a minimalist musical score – it can furnish context, texture, mood and a built-in, organic sense of place.
Thomas Hardy, whose darkling thrush feels like the bird at the centre of the world, also knew how to knit birdsong into the sprawling patterns of a novel. His 1892 tragedy Tess of the D’Urbervilles tells the story of the country girl Tess Durbeyfield. Tess’s journey – I won’t spoil the plot, but I can tell you it doesn’t end well – is soundtracked by shifting tides of birdsong. Sometimes they signal that life – nature, England, the Wessex countryside, locked into its time-worn ways – goes on (‘the birds shook themselves in the hedges, arose, and twittered’); they can echo and amplify Tess’s happiness (‘in every bird’s note there seemed to lurk a joy’) or her despondency (‘only a solitary cracked-voiced reed sparrow greeted her from the bushes by the river, in a sad, machine-made tone’); at the moment of her downfall, the birds are silent in the trees overhead, roosting ‘in their last nap’.
The birds, in many ways, are incidental; barely there traces in the currents of the novel. In other ways, though, they are vital – they, along with a thousand other details, act like drawstrings, pulling the novel together, fastening Tess and Angel Clare and Alec D’Urberville more tightly into the mesh of place, time and plot. This is birdsong as landscape.
We don’t often notice background noise in fiction, perhaps because writers don’t think about it much, either. Only a few spring to mind: there’s the clangour of the bells of medieval Paris in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame; there’s the ‘rough music’ of Londoners shovelling snow from their doorsteps in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. But Hardy wasn’t alone among nineteenth-century novelists in using birdsong to add an additional dimension to his landscapes (and his tragedies).
George Eliot’s 1859 novel Adam Bede has themes in common with Tess – one reviewer at the time objected to Eliot’s insistence on ‘the startling horrors of rustic reality’, foreshadowing the moralist uproar that broke around Hardy’s novel thirty-odd years later – and shares, too, an intimacy with the noises of the English countryside.
Eliot was a novelist with an ear as well as an eye: at daybreak in Hayslope, ‘daylight quenches the candles and the birds begin to sing’; Adam Bede, walking in winter, hears ‘the gurgling of the full brooklet hurrying down the hill, and the faint twittering of the early birds’; the touches and glances of the early days of a love affair are compared to ‘the first-detected signs of coming spring . . . though they be but a faint indescribable something in the air and in the song of the birds’.
It’s not that these are especially vivid descriptions of birdsong (both Hardy and Eliot, you’ll have noticed, fall back on the catch-all ‘twittering’); it’s just that they’re there, intrinsic to the worlds that Adam Bede and Tess Durbeyfield inhabit. And they inhabit them more fully because the birds are singing in the hedgerows.
But novelists aren’t the only ones to have realised the transformative power of birdsong as backdrop.
‘We use sound effects to paint pictures that stretch beyond the frame,’ says Helen Dickson, ‘and birdsong is no exception.’ Helen is a sound editor whose work has been heard on television, film and radio productions ranging from week-night detective dramas to versions of Macbeth and Under Milk Wood. There’s more to birdsong on film, she tells me, than the obvious – crows in a graveyard, say, or an owl hooting over a night-time establishing shot. Springtime song can be deployed to create a relaxing effect; conversely, the noises of birds of prey – the scraa of a peregrine, perhaps, or a red kite’s peee-oww – can lend a note of anxiety or menace (their tone often comes across as ‘mocking’, Helen says). A well-timed peacock’s shriek can lighten an atmosphere like a funny one-liner.
Birdsong is particular useful because of its many-layered associations with time and place. Screaming swifts – as heard in the BBC’s 2016 War and Peace production – tell you, without making a big deal about it, that we’re in the northern summertime. Geese honking overhead suggest that the year has turned, and that winter is coming. The jabber of roosting starlings might place us in a city at dusk as effectively as the glow of neon or the hire light of a cruising taxicab. These are noises that do their work – take us to other places, at other times – without us really noticing.
And if you want to convey a sense of unease, of things not being quite as they ought to be, birdsong can be tinkered with: slowed down, or played backwards, or lowered in pitch (the calls of baby owls and swans were manipulated to create some of the dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park – but that’s another story).
It’s easy to get it wrong.
‘Placing birdsong is a delicate art,’ Helen says. ‘It can easily be overdone. We don’t want the viewer to be removed from the moment. Repetitive sounds and too many effects can start to sound dubbed-on, and not at all natural.’
Again, the bird songs are incidental, extras in walk-on parts, painstakingly backgrounded and secondary to the main action – and yet they are indispensable. Birdsong is context; without it, we find it that bit more difficult to make sense of the world.
Earlier in this chapter, I casually dropped in the word ‘biophony’. It’s a terrific word, and we should all get used to using it. It was coined in 1998 by the sound recordist Bernie Krause in his book Into a Wild Sanctuary to describe the totality of sounds created by living things (other than people) in a given habitat – so that might include birdsong, the stridulations of crickets, the humming of bees, the barking of foxes, and a whole lot of other noises. Krause later rounded out his acoustic glossary by adding the terms geophony (noises made by the earth and elements: the chortling of a stream, say, or the rumbling of thunder) and anthropophony (noises made by people).
I got in touch with Krause after reading his last book, The Great Animal Orchestra. I was fascinated by his work in natural acoustics, and by how the concept of biophony might allow us to integrate the sounds we hear with the earth we tread. If we want to talk about birdsong and landscape – and if we want it to mean anything – we have to talk about biophony.
‘Natural soundscapes’, Krause writes, ‘are the voices of whole ecological systems.’
Chatting over email (and across half a dozen time zones), I asked Krause how – over an evolutionary timescale – a bird might develop its songs and calls in response to the animals, birds and landscape around it; how a species might find its place in the biophony. ‘It all depends on a combination of factors, such as topography, vegetation, the micro-climate, the time of day or night, season, humidity, altitude, temperature, atmospheric pressure, the geophony, and vocal organism mix,’ he replied. Okay. This was likely to get complicated.
Krause explained to me the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis (ANH): the idea that each noise-making animal will evolve into a niche from where it can transmit the sounds it needs to transmit in order to survive. It will find a way to make its voice heard.
‘If its voice is germane to its success, then it will need to find unimpeded channels to convey those signals,’ Krause elaborated. ‘Over time, and if there isn’t some kind of natural disturbance, the definition of these niches tends to become more and more clear.’
There might be countless bioacoustic factors feeding into the noises a bird makes. An example Krause gives in his book is the way in which some species will wait until the surrounding landscape has been dried out by the sun before beginning to sing – warm, arid air will allow their voices to carry further. Others might make use of the resonant stillness of a lake for the same purpose. Birds like this really are playing the landscape like an instrument.
Frequency is important, too. For example, songs in which lower notes and whistles predominate are less liable to be broken up – ‘degraded’ – by vegetation than higher-pitched songs; however, low-frequency song suffers greater degradation when it’s sung less than a metre or so from the ground.
It’s all pretty complex stuff, but if the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis is correct then the birds will ‘know’ these things – that is to say, they’ll have evolved to mostly sing low notes and whistles in thick vegetation, and to hit the higher notes in habitats where the cover is less dense.
And indeed, it seems that they do know these things, and much else besides: ambient noise, reverberation and interference all appear to have been factored in by natural selection during the evolution of many bird songs. South American antbirds, song sparrows in the US, little greenbuls in the central African rainforest and great tits in English woodland all show the variations we’d expect. The acoustic landscape has made its mark.
Talking to Krause, it seemed notable that those two emblematic songsters of ours, the skylark and the nightingale, both have songs that are heavy on geographical context: the skylark’s is delivered from the summit of a towering display-flight, while the nightingale’s always – in England, anyway – comes from dense undergrowth. I wondered how these contrasting factors might have affected the songs themselves. But Krause couldn’t say.
‘Context is everything’, he agreed – but a biophony is a web, a tapestry of a thousand crisscrossing threads that is practically impossible to unpick. All we can say for sure is that, if a bird evolved in a British landscape, we really can hear a little bit of Britain in its song.
* I later learned that the piafs of Paris suffered a population crash, too. The city cherishes its raffish sparrows, and yet – for no obvious reason – numbers fell by around 200,000 over a seventeen-year period. One French newspaper argued that home improvements in ramshackle housing districts had deprived the sparrows of cosy homes in broken roofs, flawed guttering and tumbledown walls, and called the sparrows ‘victims of gentrification’.
* The British Ornithologists’ Union had actually conferred ‘species’ status on the Scottish crossbill way back in 1980, but their evidence hadn’t been enough to sway the RSPB.
* According to Mark Cocker, co-author with Richard Mabey of Birds Britannica (Chatto & Windus, 2005), a cock-chaffinch in its singing prime will repeat its principal phrase about six times a minute, and up to 3,000 times a day. The record for the most balls bowled by one bowler in a single day’s Test cricket, by contrast, is 288 (C. F. Root, Old Trafford, 1926).
* My wife, who is much cleverer than me (but couldn’t tell a chiffchaff from a willow warbler if her life depended on it), works in complexity science, so I just asked her to clarify the difference between ‘complex’ and ‘complicated’. She said that if you can predict what’s going to come out by looking at what’s going in, it might be complicated; if you know what’s going in but still can’t say what’s going to come out, that’s complexity.