Tuning in to birdsong is hard to beat

LIKE the birds, we are creatures of sight and sound, not smells. Tune in, says author Simon Barnes, to “the soundtrack of planet Earth” and benefits, material and spiritual, will follow.

His entertaining book, Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed, An Introduction To Birdsong, is of the ‘birdsong made simple’ variety.

In it everything is minimised. It’s small physically, most chapters are two or three pages long and the short staccato sentences have few subordinate clauses. The simplicity, however, is deceptive; Barnes knows his subject and presents it far more effectively than do the authors of more erudite tomes. He recommends a birdsong podcast which readers can download when reading the text. Although sound recordings help beginners, Barnes insists that the best tutors are the birds themselves.

A chick in the egg never hears its mother’s heart, whereas we humans are born after “a nine-month-long drum solo”. Is that why our music has a beat to it whereas that of birds’ hasn’t, Barnes asks. We got the idea of melody, and perhaps even of speech, from the birds. Not so long ago people were as familiar with natural sounds as we are today with the makes of cars and the names of celebrities. That birdsong recognition should become the preserve of specialists and buffs is an odd turn of events.

Each bird species gets its own little chapter and these are interspersed with concise, often irreverent, treatments of birdy topics. “As a dog pisses, a bird sings,” remarks Barnes. “Territory is not property, nor is singing the equivalent of the traditional country greeting, ‘What the fuck are you doing on my land?’

“Woodpeckers are percussionists not vocalists ... Birds are bluffers who deceive each other.”

But the book is far from low-brow. There are allusions to the 67,000-year-old Divje Babe flute, the poetry of Shelley and the third chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses. Barnes loves music, pointing out that birds “don’t start all at once, in a single great joyous bellow, like the Sanctus in the B Minor Mass”. No nightingale ever sang in Berkeley Square as the song suggests; that bird, he suggests, was a song thrush.

Begin your birdsong odyssey in winter, the book recommends; sound advice you might say. Once spring arrives, picking out individual songs in the cacophony will be harder. The robin is the only species to sing consistently through the darkest months and there’s a bonus — females as well as males hold forth in the off-season. With few other songs to distract the listener, learning to identify the robin’s dulcet tones isn’t difficult.

Next, Barnes recommends, listen out for the wren. Its song always comes from low down in a bush and there’s a trill towards the end of it. He once slowed a recording from eight and a half seconds to 66 seconds. There were 103 notes, sung at a rate of 740 per minute.

Then attention is turned to the “drab” little dunnock. Its song is equally dull. “Always watch the quiet one; dunnocks are made for sex ... He goes in for cloacal pecking, in which he attempts to remove any sperm deposited by a previous male.”

Other poor and indifferent singers also get a look-in. Long-tailed tits aren’t what you’d call star vocalists. Their non-stop ‘sisisi sisisi’ calls enable the frantic little flocks to stay intact as they flit from bush to bush. “They hate to be alone,” declares Barnes. On great tits, with their huge repertoire of calls, he quotes Bill Oddie: “One final piece of advice. If you hear a call and don’t recognise it, it’s a great tit.”

Cuckoos, curlews and corncrakes are among the legion of birds which have named themselves. Some have gone even further in enriching human language. Birds of prey, for example, utter mewing calls, so a “mews” was where you kept your hawks and falcons.

* Birdwatching With Your Eyes Closed, An Introduction To Birdsong by Simon Barnes is published by Short Books.