My feelings about birdsong – no, my problems with birdsong – were crystallised for me in, appropriately enough, a tweet, one day in 2011:
@BrianGittins1: The birds are talking to one another in their stupid language.
It was the comedian David Earl, tweeting in the guise of his alter ego Brian Gittins. It was a joke, of course. But for me, it felt liberating – like reading an article about how Futurama really was a better show than The Simpsons, or meeting someone who says that no, they don’t really get Radiohead’s later albums either.
My name is Richard and I was a birdsong sceptic.
I’d better explain myself. I’m a birdwatcher;* I have been, on and off, since I was little (I inherited it from my granddad, along with skinny ankles and a love of Test cricket). The thing was, as a kid I didn’t do a great deal of actual birdwatching. In theory, I was all for it; in practice, it turned out that the countryside, once you got there, was just so full of diverting alternative pastimes (playing army, going on rope swings, falling out of trees, general fighting, shouting, etc.) that the birds didn’t get a look-in. One just didn’t have the time.
But I was a studious reader of nature books, field guides, the magazines sent out by the Young Ornithologists’ Club – anything, really, as long as birds were involved. The nineteenth-century naturalist Charles Waterton (who lived just down the road from where I grew up in Wakefield, West Yorkshire) warned about people like me: young amateur naturalists ‘who spent more time in books than in bogs’.
This explains, I think, why for a long time my experiences of the bird-life around me – the way I saw it, identified it, thought and felt about it – were missing a dimension.
When I was twelve or so, I could identify practically any bird in my bird book by sight (give or take the odd wandering warbler or far-off winter gull). Here is a full list of birds I could identify by sound alone at that age:
(1) Some sort of crow
I knew a caw when I heard it. It meant there was definitely a crow or a rook or a jackdaw or possibly a magpie in the vicinity.
(2) (a) A woodpigeon, unless it was a collared dove
(2) (b) A collared dove, unless it was a woodpigeon
I knew a coo, too. It’s strange to think that collared doves were unknown in the UK until the 1950s; when I was a boy, in 1980s suburbia, they were all over the place, like pale-grey pebbles balanced on roof-ridges and half-hidden in leylandii.
(3) A duck
Well, come on.
(4) A herring gull
The twanging pyah pyah pyah bawled from a fishing-village chimney was – and still is – the sound of a summer holiday on the Yorkshire coast, no less than the marvellous ching, chunk, whirr and bleep of Corrigan’s seafront arcade in Scarborough.
Surprise entry at Number 5. Our suburban cul-de-sac was bounded on one side by Mr Andrassy’s smallholding. It can only have been an acre or two, but at one time or another he kept geese, deer, guinea fowl, goats and peacocks. They were often on our back lawn, confusing the cat. Andrassy’s smallholding is all houses now.
Birdsong wasn’t part of my world. No, that’s not quite right: it was, but – like my parents’ mortgage, or the government’s education policy, or the electronics of my GameBoy – I couldn’t make anything of it; it didn’t mean anything to me. I was shut out of the birds’ conversation.*
This book is about what I’d been missing – partly, at least. It’s also about what people – poets, bird fanciers, composers, film-makers, ornithologists, you, even me – have been hearing. It’s about skylarks and nightingales (much harder to avoid in poetry than in real life), but it’s also about magpies and wagtails, chaffinches and sparrows; it’s about the tuts and sneezes of the wren, the booee of the starling’s swanee-whistle, the blackbird’s burble, the woodpigeon’s somnolent coo (‘take two cows, Taffy,’ they’re supposed to say); the squeaky hinge of the great tit, the chiffchaff’s unending two-step, the jay’s B-movie screams in the oak canopy. All the stuff I never really paid attention to.
The funny thing is that I wasn’t alone in my cluelessness about birdsong. In 1935, the biologist Walter Garstang – of whom more later – lamented that ‘the number of our countrymen and women who can pick out an individual song from the orchestra of spring and correctly identify it is extraordinarily small’. Even way back in the 1760s, the naturalist Gilbert White (one of the great listeners) found that the yeomen of his Hampshire village believed that the reeling call of the grasshopper warbler was made by an insect: ‘The country people laugh when you tell them that it is the note of a bird.’
It’s not that they didn’t care, exactly. They just didn’t listen.
Percy Edwards, who went on to find fame on the radio as a peerless and painstaking bird-imitator, recalled the music-hall ‘bird whistlers’ with whom he’d often shared a bill in the early days of his career. Many would just stick their fingers in their mouths and whistle, making a noise like no bird ever made; to impersonate a thrush, one of them told Edwards, ‘I just do the same noise I do for them all.’ The audiences, presumably, didn’t know what sort of noise a thrush (or a skylark, or a blackbird) actually makes – but they’d still paid for a ticket. Perhaps the general idea was something along the lines of ‘I don’t know much about birdsong, but I know what I like.’
On the website of the University of Aberdeen’s ‘Listening to Birds’ project – a fascinating study of our relationship with birdsong – researcher Andrew Whitehouse posts comments from members of the public recalling memorable birdsong experiences. It’s wonderful: an in-their-own-words archive of how we listen to birds, and what it is we hear. One contributor remembers scraping a living as a songwriter in north London, skint and unhappy:
Each night I would go for a long walk around Islington, and even in January of 1992–3 I could hear nightingales singing their beautiful songs. There are not many things on a bleak January night to cheer you up but I always noticed this.
It’s an experience with which, I think, a lot of us can identify: the way a bright bird song on a lonely street can lift our mood, or leaven our loneliness, or bring a little bit of countryside into the brick canyons and concrete precincts of urban N5.
Only the thing is, there aren’t any nightingales in Islington; there aren’t any nightingales north of Egypt in January. What the skint songwriter heard were almost certainly robins. That doesn’t spoil a sweet and touching story (everyone loves a robin); it just makes the point that we can have important relationships with birds’ songs without knowing very much about them. Our relationships with birdsong are, as they say on Facebook, complicated. That’s what this book is about.
Elsewhere in his autobiography, Percy Edwards recalls hearing a greenfinch calling mary, mary :
I felt as though I’d never heard a bird before. I had, of course. They’d been chirruping away in the background all the time . . . but I’d somehow managed to shut the birds out of my consciousness. Now one had forced his way through, and suddenly my ears were opened and birdsong of every kind poured in.
I can’t say it’s exactly been that way for me. In the last few years I’ve tried to unstopper my ears and listen, really listen, to what the birds are saying. But it hasn’t been about just one bird – they’ve all chipped in, the wrens by the river, the goldfinches chinking like a pocketful of pound coins in next door’s laburnum, the sibilant dunnocks in the front yard. Best of all have been the blackcaps. The cock-blackcap is a dull grey scrap of a bird with a smart, forward-tilted black cap; it’s occasionally called the ‘northern nightingale’,* because unlike the actual nightingale it’s found north of the Humber.
I love the blackcap’s song. I love it so much that I can give you a list of my top three singing blackcaps: (3) at Bingley, beside the Leeds–Skipton canal on a sunny, blustery day, perhaps three years ago, feathers fluffed, the wind spiking up his crest; (2)at Eccup reservoir one May, with the roadside foliage thick and wild; he was elusive, flitting here and there on urgent blackcap business, loosing off the song in reckless, intermittent volleys; (1)on my local patch, in ash-and-alder woodland by the Aire, intrepid on a looping stem above a hedgerow, and giving it some welly in the teeth of a bitter April wind.
The blackcap’s song is completely mad. Gilbert White called it ‘a sweet, wild note’; wild is right – or rather, wild isn’t the half of it. Cracked, drunken, loud, littered with chitters and whistles, and generally all over the shop – it doesn’t sound at all like music to me, and I think that’s sort of the point. The blackcap doesn’t give a damn what it sounds like to me. Birds never do.
There’s a gap, I think, between the noises the birds are making and the songs we’re hearing. Birdsong belongs to the birds, but we’ve spent an awful lot of time trying to make it ours, too: we’ve translated it into poetry and crowbarred it into music; we’ve caged it and recorded it, copied it and studied it. We’ve transformed the way we hear it; we’ve even changed the way they sing it (and if we go on as we are we may end up silencing it – but that’s something for the last chapter). In a thousand different ways, birdsong has inspired us.
Between the drumming tympanums of a bird’s syrinx and the processing centres of the human brain, something fascinating is going on. It’s been going on for thousands of years: us, the birds, their stupid language and what it says to us.
* A birdwatcher but not, I think, a birder: that term suggests something a bit more hardcore, a bit more camo-jacketed and scope-toting and let’s-go-sit-at-Spurn-Point-in-a-March-blizzard-and-see-what-turns-up (and I’m certainly not a twitcher, an elevated state of being that is something between an alternative lifestyle choice and an untreated neurosis).
* Anyway, according to Douglas Adams in Life, the Universe and Everything their conversation is ‘fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realise that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it.’
* Historically, though, the term has been applied mainly to the song thrush, the redwing and many a touring Scandinavian opera-singer.