Bird Song by Adam Nicolson: Why birds are clever, shrewd – and VERY raunchy
Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood by Adam Nicolson (William Collins £22, 448 pp)
Everyone knows that birds sing and make music, just like we do. But just how advanced their musical appreciation can be almost defies belief.
One American researcher played two different pieces of classical music to pigeons: some by Johann Sebastian Bach – the Prelude in C Minor for flute – and some by the modernist German composer Paul Hindemith.
If the pigeons pecked at a small trap door when the Bach was played, they were rewarded with grain, but with the Hindemith, nothing. They soon learned to distinguish between the two composers. They could distinguish almost as well between Bach and Stravinsky.
They even managed to do pretty well with completely new composers – contemporaries of Bach like Scarlatti versus moderns like Elliott Carter. You can’t help wondering if all human beings would be so proficient at this test as these bird-brains.
Adam Nicolson is a prize-winning author with a special love of the sea. Yet he freely admits that he has never really looked at or learned about the birds on his own patch in Sussex. He writes: ‘I never really paid much attention to birds – too small, too evasive, too difficult to know.’
His land is full of bird-life though, having been half abandoned by farming – heavy, claggy Sussex Weald, whose very field names tell the story: Slidden Mede, The Stumblets, The Wagmires. No plough is ever going to like this country. But wildlife loves it.
So aiming to rectify his ignorance, he puts himself through ‘bird school’, as he calls it, an intensive course of reading the latest research, and studying the birds close-up, even building his own bird hide complete with wood-burning stove for winter.
The result of what he learned is this marvellous and revelatory guide to our native bird-life. In lyrical prose he describes how different birds take off and fly away when we appear, owls and buzzards with ‘a kind of disdainful calm’, but blackbirds with ‘a car-alarm-disturbed-terror shriek’ that can make you jump every time.
Good Listener: A tawny owl’s hearing nerve actually branches into the optical centre of its brain, meaning they literally see what they can hear
Other things are revealed, more by research rather than observation. For instance, the startling fact that at this time of year, spring, a male wren’s testicles grow in size 100 times over, from the size of mustard seeds to peas. Crikey.
Pumped brimful of testosterone, no wonder this tiny 10 gram bird patrols his territory so ferociously, attacking any rival males, and singing a fabulous trilling song that can be heard up to 600 yards away, his tail firmly and expressively cocked straight up in the air. Just so the girls get the message.
There are chapters on songbirds and on migrants, all jam-packed with fascinating insights, as well as entire chapters on some of our most charismatic species, such as tawny owls and ravens.
Take the first. We have only recently discovered that a tawny owl’s hearing nerve actually branches into the optical centre of its brain, meaning that the owl literally sees what it can hear – the faint rustling of a woodmouse below must conjure an instant, very accurate mental image.
Setting off to hunt, the male calls ‘To whoo’, the female replying ‘Tu whit’, the familiar sounds of woodlands. Amazingly, though, it seems owls don’t have especially good night vision.
An ear for the Masters: An American researcher found pigeons could distinguish between Bach and Stravinsky
Their hearing is excellent, but their real strength is that they spend their entire lives – up to 20 years – in the same small patch of woodland or farmland, every tree, every hedgerow and fallen branch retained in memory, an incredibly detailed mental map that enables them to navigate in the dark without difficulty.
They’ve travelled in the past, though. Our British tawnies are ultimately descended from populations in the Balkans, surviving there in the forests beyond the edge of the great ice sheets of the Ice Ages. From there, they spread north and west and to Britain by about 8000BC, ‘as slowly as the forests that recolonised the warming continent, at about 300 to 500 yards a year’.
The author often gives us this look back into prehistory, offering a vivid sense of the lordly slowness and unhurried timespan of nature compared to our brief, busy lives.
It’s dizzying to think that after dinosaurs left the field of play 65 million years ago or so, by 47 million years ago, the world’s coasts and wetlands were already ‘filled with gannets, flamingos, swifts, nightjars and hummingbirds’. Compared to humanity’s modest 200,000 years on Earth, these birds have been here a very long time indeed.
Ravens are known to be clever, but Nicolson reveals just how startlingly smart they are. They can even read other birds’ minds.
Fight or Flight: When a black bird flies away it makes a ‘a car-alarm-disturbed-terror shriek’
If they end up with surplus food, from theft or from a finding a bonanza of carrion, they will hide gobbets of its around their territory in up to 25 different caches. But if a raven knows that a rival witnessed the burying of one cache but not another, that is the cache he will dig up, ignoring the other. He knows not only which bird he saw when he was burying the food but what the other raven saw at the same time.
By guessing the other bird’s intentions, he knows what another raven is thinking.
Bird School is a magical reminder of the rich, inexhaustible pleasures of watching wildlife and bird-life, not as an obsessive twitcher trying to tick off rare species, but simply being in nature.
On watching wildlife, Nicolson reflects: ‘It is strange how much happiness it brings. I can hardly tear myself away.’
Bird School is an intoxicating and joyous invitation to us all, to step out into nature and take it all in. Relax. Breathe. And listen to the birds.