A Sky Full of Birds

by Matt Merritt

  The dream-me who hears all this eventually gives in to the inevitable, and lets the torrent of song wash over and through him. The song speaks of distances and journeys and of other voices heard along the way. It talks of renewal and rebirth. It is energising, and cleansing, and I open my eyes from the dream to realise it has become a part of my waking self, and that spring is once again sprung.

  It’s a dream you can have, too.

  Most of us recognise a few bird songs, at least. The cuckoo’s disyllabic public service announcement that spring has arrived. The tuneful, rhapsodic performance of the blackbird, from atop the TV aerial of your house. The silvery strands of the robin’s broadcast, flung upon midwinter snows and balmy spring evenings alike. The suburban jangle of the chaffinch.

  But there’s more, so much more. The dawn chorus – that sudden outpouring of song to greet the coming of daylight – is found all over the world, but a lucky combination of factors makes Britain’s chorus better than most. Than any, some would say.

  For a start, we have four very distinct seasons, which means that mating and breeding are concentrated into a relatively short space of time. In warmer climes, these can go on for much longer. Here, in addition to establishing and maintaining a territory, songbirds have to attract a mate (or re-woo last year’s) within the few short weeks that occur from late winter through to late spring. They can’t afford to waste time, because in many cases the food that their nestlings need will only be available during a narrow window of opportunity; and they might also be hoping to raise more than one brood. Any delay risks them getting behind schedule, or even missing out on breeding altogether.

  For another thing, we have a dawn chorus that builds gradually but steadily, from a single species singing in the middle of winter, to scores lifting their voices in spring, bolstered by the arrival of migrant songbirds – primarily but not exclusively warblers – from the southern hemisphere.

  So, in the darkest days of winter, you’ll hear little in the way of song. Birds still call, but that’s completely different. A call is a way of alerting other birds to the presence of a predator (or to your own immediate presence) or, who knows, to the discovery of a food source. It’s functional, and so is short and sharp and not necessarily sweet.

  A song has another dimension entirely. It has a functional element, certainly – the singer is to some extent saying ‘I’m here’ as loudly as possible, in the hope of scaring off rivals and earning the admiration of a mate. But it’s also saying ‘I’m here’ in a much more metaphysical sense, announcing to the world the singer’s entire reason for being. Not for nothing are they called songbirds.

  Robins are the first to break into song each morning, and perhaps this explains the lasting British affection for this species as much as their bright-red breasts and their confiding nature do. The male and female hold separate feeding territories at this time and both sing from the middle of winter; in other British species it’s the male that does most if not all of it. Robins are, despite their somewhat cuddly reputation, extremely aggressive when they need to be – which is a lot of the time – and that sweet song is just one of the weapons in their armoury, used to try to ward off rivals.

  Significantly, the midwinter song of the robin is a more understated, subdued and plaintive version of their spring symphony. The birds know it’s serving a slightly different purpose, and they also know they don’t have to be quite as loud – there are no other singers to compete with.

  Most, if not all songbirds, also have a quieter, more muted version of their song, known as a subsong, which they use as a sort of warm-up for the main event. So, if you were to find the wintering grounds of, say, a UK-breeding blackcap, which lie south of the Sahara, you’d hear these sweet songsters tuning up for the breeding season ahead. And perhaps just before they leave for northern Europe you’d hear their subsong segue seamlessly into the full song, now perfected.

  In the earliest days of spring, then, the dawn chorus can take some hearing. Subsongs are whispered from bushes and trees, and although there’s a slowly gathering volume and intensity to the music it’s got a long way to go before it reaches its full glory.

  The trigger for the full performance, as with so many things in the world of birds, is a change in light levels, imperceptible to us but as obvious as a motorway sign to the singers. On a certain day in early spring – and it will vary according to the latitude you’re at, as well as the local habitat and weather conditions – a song becomes a duet, becomes a chorus.

  British birdwatchers are an affable, helpful lot, but you still get the occasional squabble between twitchers, questioning the authenticity of each other’s lists or the validity of the latest sighting; and every now and then a row will break out over an alleged incidence of suppression, when a record of a particularly interesting bird is kept from the general birdwatching public by those in the know. The finders might have a good reason for this, such as wanting to protect a nest site, but it rarely happens without a dust-up.

  Most of the time, though, to meet another birder in the hide, or on the path through your local reserve, is to be assured of a cheerful ‘good morning’, followed by a recitation of their most recent birdwatching triumphs and woes, and then detailed directions to the best birds nearby. Sometimes, they’ll even accompany you, especially if the birds in question are at all rare, even at a local level. It’s not unusual in the world of birding to find yourself making polite conversation with a stranger standing on some puddly, muddy cart-track miles from anywhere, waiting for an unobliging passage migrant to turn up and make everybody’s day worthwhile. And therein lies something of a problem. Because, for many of us – most of us, even – birdwatching is essentially a solitary pursuit.

  The reasons for this are many. It has something to do with the way that, while popular, it is not that popular. You could walk into any pub in the UK and reasonably expect to strike up a conversation about football, but fellow birders, and especially fellow birders of roughly equivalent interests and abilities, are rather thinner on the ground.

  It has something to do with the image birdwatching has always had. Not out and out negative exactly, but definitely nerdy and slightly comical. Not many birdwatchers have been in a hurry to proclaim their love of the subject to the rest of the world.

  But there’s something else. Birdwatching, in some respects, is just a replacement activity for the hunting that we’d all have engaged in once. This is at its most obvious when you see full-on twitchers looking to ‘bag’ another tick, but an element of it is there with the most casual of birdwatchers, too. Getting a good look at even the commonest of birds means learning a certain amount of stalking and fieldcraft. In the same way as with the hunter, it pays to learn your quarry’s habits and routines.

  But more than that, part of the appeal of birdwatching for myself, and I suspect many people, is that it’s a good cover for another activity generally derided by Britons – spending time on your own thinking about things. We’re not, in Britain, overly given to self-reflection. We look with suspicion upon the willingness of Americans to go to psychiatrists. Meditation is still viewed by many as belonging to the exotic East. Philosophy is for the Greeks. Or is it the French? Birdwatching, along with that other great British outdoor pursuit – walking the dog – is as close as some of us get to being able to consider the big questions in life, to commune openly with something much larger than ourselves, without frightening the neighbours.

  That was how it started, or restarted, for me. I’ve mentioned how, when I lived in Cardiff in my twenties, birdwatching gave me an incentive to get out on a long walk each day, with all the hoped-for benefits for my bad back, and the more I did it the more I rediscovered my love of birding. But the walking itself was important, too. It might sound obvious, but walking takes time, time that we’re otherwise not inclined to give ourselves in the middle of our busy lives. I found myself thinking longer, and harder, about all sorts of things. I worked out what I wanted to do in my life,
and where I wanted to be. I even started writing poetry, for heaven’s sake.

  Around five years ago I decided to do all my birdwatching for the following year on foot, with the intention of writing a feature for Bird Watching about it. While I wasn’t a big twitcher or lister, I had nevertheless got into the habit of driving from one birdwatching site to another, within a twenty-mile radius of home.

  Replacing that habit with a strictly pedestrian routine saved me an awful lot of petrol, helped me shed three stone in weight, and reminded me that walking, and birdwatching, can be therapy for a troubled, or simply tired, mind.

  But the change of routine had an effect on my birding as well. As I walked between places I started to notice new things about the behaviour of even the most familiar species. I started to pay attention to the marginal, less obvious habitats in between the reserves and the parks and gardens and farmland. Above all, I started to realise just how much of birdwatching is actually bird-listening. And once learned, it’s a lesson that enriches your birdwatching experience more than you could ever have dreamed.

  It’s early April, and I’m down at Gracedieu Woods, a mile or so from home. I carry out a woodland bird survey here once a month, so I’m planning to use this opportunity to ‘get my ear in’ ahead of a trip to one or two dawn chorus hotspots.

  It’s cold, and as I walk the first few yards into the trees, still dark. At least, it seems that way to me, but somewhere a bird has detected a thinning of the gloom and decided to salute it the only way it knows how. A robin, of course, spinning the silvery thread of its song out across the understorey of this deciduous wood, a remnant of the original Charnwood Forest.

  I stand and listen. There are more robins, further in, and in no time at all blackbirds are joining in, with their strong but sweet, fluty tones. They effortlessly run through intricate variations on a theme, with an effect that’s as close to what we recognise as music as any British bird achieves.

  But if blackbirds are the classical musicians of the British scene, then song thrushes are the jazz improvisers. Their habit of singing short, distinctive phrases loudly, clearly and two or three times over has long been noted; Robert Browning’s poem ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’ highlights the quality:

  That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,

  Lest you should think he never could recapture

  The first fine careless rapture.

  There are two things to note at this point. One is that all the birds singing so far are species that rely, for the most part, on worms and other creatures of the forest floor for their food. These food sources can reasonably be expected to be around even now, when the sun is just a rumour beneath the eastern horizon. That old saying about ‘the early bird catching the worm’ is perfectly correct, and so our robins, blackbirds and song thrushes are setting out to establish territorial rights as early as possible, ahead of what could be a day of considerable friction between competing males.

  The other point to note is that the singing of the song thrush generally increases in complexity as the season goes on, and as the years go by, because like all the best jazz musicians it has no qualms about appropriating a phrase here, a riff there, from other birds. And not just the birds in its immediate vicinity, either. I’ve stood outside my house on a warm May evening and listened to a song thrush on a leylandii repeating the two-note call of the curlew over and over. There are curlews a few miles away, but very few, so perhaps it picked up this neat trick when migrating curlew passed over; or perhaps the thrush spends its winters on one of our warmer coasts, where it’s in close proximity to the large waders.

  This habit of cutting and pasting the songs of other birds into your own is probably given its fullest expression by the marsh warbler. Like most of its family, it’s a rather unprepossessing bird to look at – a Little Brown Job if ever there was one – and it’s not easy to find in the UK, being confined mainly to Kent and parts of Worcestershire where it can find its preferred habitat of rank, seasonally flooded vegetation.

  Whatever the marsh warbler lacks in looks, though, it makes up for with the ingenuity and virtuosity of its song. During his first year, on the breeding grounds in Europe and Asia, the wintering grounds in south-east Africa, and all points between, each male picks up the songs of around seventy-five other species, then splices them together into a single symphonic whole. Each song is different, of course, because no two birds will have heard exactly the same species, and intriguingly each male also sticks to what he first learned, with no extra snatches of song added after the first year. Every male is a living history of its own first year of life, compelled to tell you the same anecdotes about its travels over and over again.

  The marsh warbler arrives in the UK late, compared to our other summer visitors. Sometimes it’s June before it turns up, but the other members of this large family start to trickle in from mid-March. Some, indeed, stay here throughout the colder months, ekeing out a living. Dartford warblers do so in the dense gorse and brush of (mainly coastal) heaths, while Cetti’s warbler, a recent colonist with an unmistakable, explosive song, skulks deep within reed beds and damp scrub. Blackcaps, on the other hand, have adapted to garden feeders to get through the cold months, while chiffchaffs hang around sewage works and farm buildings, especially in the south-west, looking for insects.

  As I stumble a little further into the wood, one of the latter starts up with his insistent, two-note song, and is answered by yet another, further in. It’s not so much a duet as a shoot-out, of course, and no other chiffchaffs yet feel inclined to argue the toss. Instead, there’s a gathering cacophony of great tits – some of them using a two-note song not unlike the chiffchaff – and finch-song: the quiet, understated warbling of bullfinches, the light, metallic tinkling of goldfinches, the wheezing and twittering of greenfinches, and the descending jangle of the chaffinch.

  Studies have shown that the chaffinch’s song varies subtly from place to place, although not so much that a birder could necessarily tell the difference. These ‘dialects’, it’s thought, serve the purpose of preventing inbreeding: female chaffinches learn to listen for a song significantly different from what they’ve heard from their fathers and male siblings.

  By the time I’ve tried and failed to decide whether there’s any difference between the songs of the chaffinches here and those at work, the sun is clear of the Charnwood hills, and the temperature is noticeably a few degrees warmer. The snap and crackle of twigs overhead betray the busy presence of grey squirrels, and the warm light filtering through the branches and budding leaves spotlights one, two, three and finally a loose crowd of small grey-brown birds perched on the edge of the small clearing, each ducking in and out of cover in turn. Like a band in a studio overlaying old tracks on new to build up a single piece of music, we have the final layer of song.

  Blackcaps chortle closest at hand, and a little further away, perhaps provoked by them, there’s the very similar rippling, babbling song of the closely related garden warbler. For a moment it rivals the sweetness of the former’s outpourings, but the irresolute ending, lacking the blackcap’s emphatic flutiness, is like the unsatisfying fade-out of a radio edit of a great song, rather than the drums and power chord full-stop of the album version.

  Soon willow warblers are joining in, too, their song like a sadder, thinner and more affecting version of the chaffinch’s; and from away on the edge of the wood there’s the excited, scratchy jibber-jabber of the whitethroat. It takes all these insect-eaters a while to join in, because they have to wait until their prey starts fluttering around to feed, but once they do they’re impossible to ignore.

  I listen for as long as my aching back and the pressing need to go to work will allow, then walk slowly home. If I was being churlish, I might reflect upon what I didn’t hear – no redstart, or pied flycatcher, no ‘spinning sixpence’ song of the wood warbler. No purring turtle doves. No cuckoo, even, although I might at least hear one of them at Gracedieu before the spring is out
.

  But I’d also have heard a quite different but equally wonderful dawn chorus had I gone a couple of miles in any direction. Up on the more open spaces of Charnwood Forest, I could have expected yellowhammers jangling out their ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’ song from telephone wires, skylarks exulting from somewhere high above the heaths, and curlews delivering their ecstatic, bubbling trill as they glide over sheep pastures.

  While the majority of passerines – that biological order of birds commonly, albeit somewhat inaccurately, known as songbirds – probably fall into the soprano bracket, contralto at deepest, there are even deeper ‘songs’ out there. The low, insistent throb of the bittern’s ‘boom’, for a start, a bassline familiar to anyone living around the fenland and marshes of East Anglia and, thankfully, increasingly far-flung areas of the rest of the UK (a pair have bred at Attenborough, on the edge of Nottingham, as I write).

  But wherever you are in the UK, whatever you’re hearing, the phenomenon of the dawn chorus is extraordinary. Extraordinary in its range, its volume, in the way that each song seems to find its own space, its own frequency. And extraordinary in the fact that it will all happen again tomorrow, and tomorrow, until breeding is done for another year.

  Having made the case for the glory of the dawn chorus, I’m bound to point out that birdsong in Britain can be wonderful at any time of day – it’s just that you won’t find quite the same intensity and range as you do at first light, when most of the male birds in these islands, along with a few of the females, are intent on announcing their continued existence, their health, vitality and virility, their possession of a desirable territory and/or residence, and their availability for intimate liaisons.