The wheatlands are green, snow and frost are away,
Birds, why are ye silent on such a sweet day?
– John Clare, ‘Birds, Why Are Ye Silent?’ (1840s)
Warnings, in the bird world, take many forms. Jays are among the most vigilant birds in the woodland: a harsh kaaugh – or several kaaughs, as a jay community passes on the message – means there’s trouble afoot. The throaty machine-gunning of a magpie tells you the same thing. A robin lisps sharply, or shouts tick!; anxious swallows – which, according to the bird writer Conor Mark Jameson, ‘will alarm-call at a passing cloud’ – send out a panicky series of che-WEE calls. Alarm calls can act as a kind of universal language among songbirds: whereas a wren’s ear-splitting song, for instance, will have no effect on a song thrush, each bird will respond briskly to the other’s alarm call. This, of course, benefits both parties (it’s never a bad idea to learn how to shout ‘Fire!’ in a foreign language) – but there’s another reason for these emergency outbreaks of mutual understanding. Alarm calls have evolved to disguise the location of the caller; the idea is that the crow or stoat or cat should find it hard to tell where the noise is coming from. Acoustically, this means that the calls should be high-pitched, pure in tone and rising in volume – and so they are, taking such similar forms (on a sonogram, they look like a family of closely related worms) that their meaning is clear even across species boundaries.
Another kind of warning is even more universally understood.
‘A sudden hush,’ Helen Macdonald calls it in H Is for Hawk. The American naturalist Sarah Hubbard describes it as a ‘cone of silence’. A hawk is on the prowl in the forest; the singing, the chirping, the companionable contact-calling stops. No one makes a sound.
Hubbard recalls the visit of a Cooper’s hawk* to her local woods in Athens, Georgia. ‘The only sound was that of the crickets, and even their song was chilling to the bone,’ she writes. ‘There was a chickadee hanging out near me, and I could see her shivering and feel that same fear in my body.’
Jon Young, in his book What the Robin Knows, describes a similar occasion in coastal California: ‘Almost all of the birds across the entire valley – robins, song sparrows, juncos, Bewick’s wrens, golden-crowned and white-crowned sparrows, California and spotted towhees, scrub jays and Steller’s jays, flickers, ruby-crowed kinglets, chestnut-backed chickadees and California quail, to name most of the players – fall into silence when a Cooper’s flies in.’
I’ve seen it myself, in England: a feeding party of long-tailed tits cuts off its familiar hubbub of zinging tsees and tsirrups and drops from the birch canopy as if gravity has been suddenly doubled. They sit tight and silent in the woodland understorey until the sparrowhawk has passed overhead.
A silent forest is a frightened forest – a forest under threat.
Most of these freezes last only a few moments – until the hawk has gone away (or until someone has been eaten). But what if they lasted a lot longer than that – for years, say, or decades? What if, in fact, the birdsong never came back at all? And what if we weren’t just talking about one patch of forest, one sparrowhawk’s territory, but all the forest, and not just the forest but the farmland, too, and the moors, and the suburban back-gardens, and the riverside reed beds, and the city rooftops?
Some numbers to consider. Between 1995 and 2013, the UK skylark population fell by 24 per cent (‘fell’ doesn’t seem quite adequate; ‘plummeted’, ‘crashed’?). That’s a lot of ‘shrill delight’ missing from our meadows. Numbers of willow tits and marsh tits – twin forest foragers, buff-grey and black-capped* – dropped by 81 and 29 per cent over the same period: an awful lot of pee-chays, tsi-tsis, chip-chips and tiu tius stripped out of our broadleaf woodland. Greenfinch, burly, frowning, sounding like a ‘gruff canary’ in the words of one bird book, down 32 per cent; mistle thrush, once known as the ‘stormcock’ for the delight it seems to find in belting out a song in the teeth of a spring gale, down 31 per cent; linnet down 29 per cent, corn bunting down 40 per cent, meadow pipit down 15 per cent; garden warbler, maestro of a sweet, wild note to rival the blackcap, down 19 per cent.
The population of nightingales in Britain dropped by 37 per cent, and really doesn’t have much further to fall. In the mid-twentieth century, the writer Aldous Huxley remarked to his brother, the zoologist Julian, that ‘we are losing half the subject matter of English poetry’, which remains true, but is only a brushstroke in the bigger picture. In a piece for the New Statesman in 2015, Helen Macdonald argued that ‘not everyone has read Keats and Clare, and nightingales do not speak to me of poetry at all. They are simply astonishing, in and of themselves.’ Losing the nightingale, she went on, would ‘constitute a thinning of human experience, a shrinking of the available meanings of spring’. Not to mention the even more severe thinning of nightingale experience – not, as we’ve seen, that the nightingales really have time to fret about that.
I do worry about the diminution that we all suffer, that everything suffers, when songbirds – and bird songs – are driven from our country. Our lives become less rich. The world’s patterns lose some of their intricacy. But what bothers me more is not so much that this happens as that we let it happen.
Some songbird declines simply aren’t our fault. Whitethroat numbers tumbled in the late 1960s because of a severe drought in their wintering grounds south of the Sahara; short of organising some sort of whitethroat Live Aid, there wasn’t a great deal we could do about that. The songbird apocalypse that Rachel Carson described in her world-changing 1962 book Silent Spring – when one Norfolk landowner reported that his estate was ‘like a battlefield’ littered with ‘innumerable corpses, including masses of small birds’ – was attributable to the use in agriculture of murderously toxic seed-dressings, now widely banned. Our modern-day bird populations still carry the dents and scars from these events and others like them, but these are artefacts, from another time, inked in the debit columns of a previous generation.
The declines of the last twenty years, though – these are ours.
What complicates matters is that we might not even really hear the silence, on account of all the noise.
In 2013, scientists in the Canadian city of Edmonton identified a curious pattern in the diversity levels of the city’s songbirds (which range from black-capped chickadees, purveyors of a marvellously clean-edged ‘pee-pee-pee’ call, to purple finches, once described as resembling ‘a sparrow dipped in raspberry juice’). Low levels of species diversity were found to correlate not with fragmented habitat or food shortages, but with noise. The deep rumble of traffic, in particular, smothered the songs and calls of birds that operate within the same low-frequency band. Without an audible song, male birds were crippled, unable to stake out territory or advertise for mates. Breeding rates, as a result, dropped. Researchers have seen similar patterns by the side of German autobahns and in the US Rocky Mountains.
It’s not just about being heard; it’s also about hearing others. Urban areas present a unique suite of threats for songbirds (one of them, our little tortoiseshell cat Hedy, is kipping under my desk as I write this). The dense networks of noise that grow up within our cities make it near-impossible for a sparrow to pick out, for instance, a blackbird’s alarm call or the giveaway tinkle of a cat’s bell. Studies of chaffinches have shown that birds in noisy districts spend less time feeding, and more time keeping an eye out for predators. If you want to imagine what life must be like for a small bird in a noisy city, put on a blindfold and take a slow walk across the Hanger Lane gyratory.
Some birds adapt, of course. It’s what wild things do: adapt, or die.
It’s thought that some urban birds begin singing earlier in the day than they usually would, in order to beat the traffic and get in ahead of rush hour (but in cities where rush hour seems to extend from seven in the morning to ten at night, like London or Brussels or LA, this strategy might run into trouble). The robins, blackbirds, blue tits and chaffinches that live under the flightpaths outside Berlin-Tegel airport reschedule their dawn choruses according to the airport’s take-off times. City great tits in the Netherlands have been found to increase the frequency of their calls. In downtown Berlin, nightingales sing more loudly, cranking up their volume in an attempt to compete with the cars, buses and Straßenbahn. Nightingales have the vocal kit to do that; many birds don’t.
The resilience of nature – its bouncebackability, as an American sportscaster might put it – goes only so far. It’s not just change but the pace of change – the suddenness of dogs and rats spilling from an adventurer’s ship onto a Pacific island, of a city of skyscrapers springing up from swampland or desert, of climate change more rapid than any seen before in our planet’s history – that does the damage.
Bernie Krause warned about the impact of the ‘anthropophony’ – human noise – on bird biophonies in The Great Animal Orchestra. First a passing aeroplane prompts the birds he is hearing to ‘quieten down to almost nothing’; then a helicopter buzzes by (‘The birds become quiet again; really silent this time.’) ‘Human-generated noise affects entire biophonies,’ he writes. In the Sequoia forests of California, ‘even distant noise-producing mechanisms interrupted the dawn chorus of many biomes within earshot, all at the same moment’.
In our exchange of emails, Krause told me that the ‘silent spring’ that Rachel Carson warned us about (and that ecologists have seldom stopped warning us about since) had already happened – in 2015, and just a twenty-minute drive from his northern California home.
‘It was the only time I’ve witnessed such a phenomenon anywhere on the planet’, he said. But this isn’t quite the kind of silence Carson was writing about. That was a silence of empty woodlands, denuded farmland, a ravaged countryside – the aftermath of a songbird holocaust wrought by reckless agribusiness. Krause’s silence, by contrast, was about what had happened to birdsong itself. In a habitat stressed to breaking point by human recklessness, it had been mugged, suffocated, cowed into quietness.
‘There were lots of birds present,’ Krause says. ‘But not a single song or call.’
The biologist Bridget Stutchbury reaches for an apt metaphor when she writes about songbird populations in her book Silence of the Songbirds: the canary in the mine.
As we’ve seen, miners have been using caged canaries for centuries to guard against poisonous gases: when carbon monoxide reaches a hazardous level, the canary conks out. Looking at the stats – the recent steep falls in numbers of migratory US songbirds such as the eastern kingbird, Kentucky warbler and bobolink – Stutchbury concludes that what we have here is a dead canary.
But actually it’s worse than that. Stutchbury points out that the death of a miner’s canary didn’t make things worse – it was simply a singing CO meter, a warning about how bad things were. With songbirds, it’s a different matter. Songbirds are a key component in the very systems they’re warning us about; they carry out essential maintenance, like controlling insect pests, distributing seeds and moving nutrients through the food chain (take a look at the pavements of Rome after a megaflock of starlings has passed through and you’ll get an idea of just how many nutrients they can move).
‘The world around us is already in a very fragile state, barely hanging on by a thread,’ Stutchbury writes. ‘We cannot afford to lose our birds.’
Ecology is complicated. It’s meant to be complicated – the more complicated the better. Ecology is the science of webs, networks; there are seldom any easy answers. What is killing our birdsong (and not only our birdsong: also the kirrri-nggk of the grey partridge, as though someone has grabbed the bird by the throat part-way through; also the bubbles and wails of the curlew, more common now in books about the uplands than in the uplands themselves; also the rook’s caw ; also the wild waheys of the lapwing)?*
I don’t know how much we should blame intensive farming (changes in land use, new patterns of crop management, pesticides and inorganic fertilisers); I don’t know how much to blame the winnowing of our woodlands and the drainage of our wetlands, or pollution, or the insistent lichen-like spread of our towns and cities.† But I do think these things can be bundled together under a single heading: neglect.
Maybe we don’t care because we don’t see or hear the birds around us; maybe we don’t see or hear them because we don’t care. Maybe we just think that other things are more important (George Osborne, when he was Chancellor, described breeding nightingales as ‘feathered obstacles’ to economic growth – goodness, we’re a long way from Clare and Coleridge now).
Or maybe it’s not that we don’t want to listen – it’s that we’ve forgotten how it’s done. I suspect that this has been a problem for longer than we care to admit.
Kurt Fristrup, a senior scientist at the US National Park Service, has called it ‘learned deafness’.
‘We are conditioning ourselves to ignore the information coming into our ears,’ he told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2015. ‘This gift that we are born with – to reach out and hear things hundreds of metres away, all these incredible sounds – is in danger of being lost through a generational amnesia.’ It’s a twofold threat: ‘There is a real danger, both of loss of auditory acuity, where we are exposed to noise for so long that we stop listening, but also a loss of listening habits, where we lose the ability to engage with the environment the way we were built to.’
Our hearing deteriorates quickly enough as it is. Earlier this year, the warden at my local patch admitted to me that he could no longer pick out the top-notes of the long-tailed tits: ‘Too much punk music, too many years working with chainsaws,’ he said ruefully. In 1774, Gilbert White – though not known to have been a punk fan – wrote sadly of his encroaching deafness: ‘I lose all the pleasing notices and little intimations arising from rural sounds; and May is as silent and mute with respect to the notes of the birds as August.’ To just give up on listening feels like a dereliction.
We don’t have to hear music in birdsong. We’re allowed to think it’s a mad racket, a clattering noise, a damnable disturbance* – but I think we should try to notice it. It’s a part of our world – both the world in which we evolved, the world of forest and savannah, heath and seashore, the world of the wild, and the world we’ve built up around ourselves: our human culture. It’s a part of us.
I wonder about where all this culture fits in – all the poetry, all the music, the meditations, the potent sonic iconography of birdsong. How has it affected the way we think about real-life birds? It’s deepened our attachment to them, I’m sure, but I worry that it’s made us complacent. We sometimes talk about a place or a person or a bird song being ‘immortalised in verse’; I worry that we take that a little bit too literally. All this effort we’ve gone to to capture birdsong, in art, in music, in vaudeville impersonations, in sonograms and wax cylinders – do we think that we’ve put birdsong out of danger, preserved it, set it safely in glass like a flower in a paperweight? As long as we have a Works of Wordsworth on the bookshelf, we’ll have cuckoos. As long as we can call up a Respighi piece on Spotify, we’ll have nightingales.
It doesn’t work like that, of course. Birdsong is dynamic and ongoing; nature isn’t a museum but a churning mill of individuals, species, climates and habitats. We shouldn’t forget that – I worry that we will, though, if we don’t keep listening to the birds.
Will we even notice if our birds fall silent?
We’ll notice eventually, I think. John Keats, you’ll remember, had an instinctive response to birdsong, a deep-brain reflex that bypassed thousands of years of evolution. I think something similar happens when the birds go quiet. We know what it means.
Helen Dickson told me that film-makers will sometimes deliberately cut out birdsong to create a feeling of dread and doom (as in, for instance, John Hillcoat’s post-apocalyptic 2009 drama The Road) – audiences notice, without being told, that something is wrong. We’ve seen how the birds stopped singing for Thomas Hardy’s Tess when the world turned against her.
Even more suggestive of a world gone awry, nature out of joint, is ‘The Pike’s Song’ of 1928, by the Finnish poet Aaro Hellaakoski. In this poem, a pike – a duckling-snatching predatory fish – climbs a tree, and begins to sing, so wildly that ‘birds fell silent / immediately / as if overcome by / the waters’ weight / and lonesomeness’ / cold embrace’. It’s a profoundly strange vision from another poet who knew the natural world well (Hellaakoski was a geographer by trade); the suffocated silence of the birds is central to the deep-seated sense of unease.
More recently, in Denise Levertov’s ‘Sound of the Axe’, the birds cease to sing because the ‘world-tree’ is about to be felled: ‘The birds were silent. Why? she said. / Thunder, they told her, / thunder is coming.’ Another elemental threat, looming like a blue-black storm cloud; another intimation of something bad coming our way. And Keats himself used the same trick: the first stanza of his ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ ends with four cold, thudding syllables: ‘And no birds sing.’
These writers and film-makers understood what we all half-consciously know: what a silent spring means to us, deep down, in the part of us that remembers how wild things work. Quiet birds are bad news.
So I think we’ll notice, eventually, as our springs fall silent. The question is whether we’ll notice in time to do something about it.
There are apps for identifying bird songs now, and I think that’s great; there’s xeno-canto, and the RSPB website, and a hundred other resources to help you tell a chet from a whet from a wheet from a tweet – or, for that matter, a tack from a chack. Does technology distance us from nature? It doesn’t have to. It can, on the contrary, give us a direct line through to the wild world; it can keep alive our engagement with the way things really are, the way birds really sing. It can help us to listen (what you do with what you hear is up to you).
I still find it hard to pick out a treecreeper’s call in an April woodland. I think that trying, though, is worth the effort.
This makes me think of a moment in the gentle BBC television sitcom Detectorists. Metal-detector enthusiast Lance worries that, in unearthing a valuable Saxon trinket, he has brought down a curse on himself; that he has disturbed the natural currents of the countryside, and forfeited his connection with nature. ‘I’ve started stumbling over rocks and tripping into nettles and I can’t remember birdsong any more,’ he complains. No spoilers here: he makes amends, I won’t say how, but once he has done so a ripple of birdsong sounds in the background. ‘Blackbird,’ says Lance, correctly, and smiles.
Detectorists feels like a very English programme. The first episode opens with a skylark’s song (pleasingly, the species is precisely specified in the script by the writer and co-star, Mackenzie Crook). Birdsong and place are, as we’ve seen, closely interlocked; both offer us a feeling of continuity – but both, like everything else, are subject to change, too. And both have a habit of telling us back our own tales.
I’ve paid a lot of attention to the birds around me since I started researching this book. Well, I’ve always done that – since I was a nine-year-old getting overexcited about a siskin on the bird-feeder – but this time I’ve been listening, too. The duelling robins at the railway station. The autumn dipper zooting and honking on the weir. The medley of dinky finches in the high sycamores opposite my mum and dad’s house. The blackcap in the hedgerow. Once you start listening, the stuff is suddenly everywhere.
I still think that there’s more babble than beauty in birdsong. I’m allowed to think that and still think it’s wonderful.
* A formidable bird of prey – fast, powerful, agile; bigger than a sparrowhawk, smaller than a goshawk – native to woodlands across the US. It has an alarm call of its own: a rapid yik-yik-yik that sounds not unlike an angry monkey.
* Graham Shortt offered me another ID tip here, based on the relative tidiness of the marsh tit’s plumage: ‘Marsh is off to work; willow is just back from a three-day rock festival.’
* It was once said that lapwings were the cursed souls of those who taunted Jesus Christ on his way to Golgotha. That’s never sat right with me: lapwings – whooping and wheeling and dive-bombing on pied, spoony wings – always look to be having far too much fun.
† I do know, by the way, how much we should blame egg-thieving, nestling-murdering magpies: not at all. Contrary to the rot they run in the tabloids, magpies – like all predators – are part of the ecosystem; they’re a cog in the machine. Problems only arise when ecosystems become unbalanced, by abrupt or drastic change. Quiz question: what’s got two opposable thumbs and a habit of imposing drastic change on ecosystems?
* It might, indeed, drive us mad, as the song of the common hawk-cuckoo or ‘brain-fever bird’ was said to do: ‘The song of the brain-fever demon starts on a low but steadily rising key,’ wrote Mark Twain in Following the Equator (1897), ‘and is a spiral twist which augments in intensity and severity with each added spiral, growing sharper and sharper, and more and more painful, more and more agonizing, more and more maddening, intolerable, unendurable, as it bores deeper and deeper and deeper into the listener’s brain, until at last the brain fever comes as a relief and the man dies. I am bringing some of these birds home to America.’