May is always a busy month for me, as it is birdsong season. Every year since I moved back to the UK fifteen years ago, I have led birdsong walks and workshops. And every year I have told participants that May is absolutely the wrong time of year to learn birdsong.
Correction: May is a fabulous time of year to learn birdsong. But not to begin learning. Time and again I’ve seen people melt down on a May morning, as they struggle to distinguish the many songsters in the chorus. How can you expect to recognise the subtly different tones of blackcaps and garden warblers if you can’t pick up the strident whirring of a wren, the cheery chiming of a great tit?
In the old joke, the traveller asking for directions is told, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have started from here.’ In the same way, every year in May I tell workshop participants that they should have started learning birdsong in January.
Robin singing by Gillian Day
Hear me out. At the start of the year there is essentially only one bird singing in Norfolk: the robin. Robins — both males and females — sing throughout winter. A bird in full song in your garden, the park or the woods in January is therefore very likely a robin. So start by learning robin song. As winter robins often sing from prominent perches, check that your songster really is one; then watch it as you wallow in its voice. The sight of a robin and its song will be forever bound together in your memory.
Don’t get too bogged down in what a robin says, as a robin doesn’t say anything especially distinctive. Focus instead on what a robin’s song makes you feel. Robins sound watery to me, like an upland stream trickling over gravel. They also sound unutterably melancholy. Even at the giddy height of spring — when countless birds are shouting joyfully from the fresh green canopy of the woods — robins sound wistful, even sad. But don’t just take my word for it. Find out what robin song feels like to you, as it’s your ears that will be picking it out from the chorus in five months’ time.
Once you have mastered robin song, and know it instantly every time you hear it, you are perfectly prepared for the appearance in the late winter chorus of singing wrens, dunnocks and mistle thrushes. You’re wandering through the park one day in February, congratulating yourself warmly on having aced the trickly, beautiful song of the robins all around you, when all of a sudden an entirely different songster burst — and I mean bursts — into song.
Last year you might not have heard the difference but now — now that you have spent a month becoming friends with robin song — it is unmistakably the case that this is a different songster. So different in fact that you’re almost offended by the boisterous song you’re hearing now. Who is this interloper in the park you’ve shared for weeks with only robins?
Wren singing loudly by Tim Stringer
Boisterous is the giveaway: it’s a wren. How, you wonder, is it possible that just six months ago you couldn’t distinguish this whirring firecracker of a song from a robin’s. How could you think the gentle, languid robin and the strident, fast-paced wren sounded similar? The answer lies in having made friends with robins first. Now the churring of the wren stands out. So too the breathless, hurried dunnock and the joyous bugling of the mistle thrush, delivered from a lofty tree.
Take a breath. Listen. Indulge. Don’t get caught up in running when you still have deliberate steps to take. You’ve mastered robin. Now make friends with wren. Learn to anticipate its signature rattling trill. For once you’re acquainted with wren, dunnock and mistle thrush, you’re prepared for chaffinches, great tits and blackbirds to tumble into song in March. Your birdsong journey has begun.
Why does it matter though? Who gives a stuff that you can tell a coal tit’s lisping, apologetic song from the similar songs of chiffchaffs and great tits? To answer this, let me introduce you to one of my heroes. Daughter, mother, PhD ecologist, writer, botanist and member of the Potawatomi Native American culture, Robin Wall Kimmerer is among the twenty-first century’s most astonishing and important voices for nature. In a host of arresting ways, she teaches that indigenous relationships with nature — in which other species have much to teach a young primate like humanity, and in which all species are endowed with personhood — can enlighten the western mindset which has caused such catastrophic environmental harm.
Among the central tenets of her teaching is the Native American honourable harvest. Recognising that, simply to exist, taking other’s lives is necessary, the honourable harvest counsels that we must respect the lives we take, even going so far as to ask permission. ‘One of the first steps of the honourable harvest,’ she teaches in an online lecture, ‘is to understand that the lives that we are taking are the lives of generous beings, of sovereign beings. And in order to accept their gift we owe them at least our attention. To care for them we must know what they need; and at the very minimum we should know their names.’
Why does this apply to us? We no longer hunt song thrushes and robins for the pot (though in much of southern Europe songbirds are still eaten and, here in the UK, snipe, woodcock and golden plover remain legal game). My point is not about the hunting of individual animals, but about the metaphorical hunt for the countless resources we take (usually take, rather than need) for our daily lives. Every square foot of earth we plough or tarmac, every cleaning product we casually flush away, every mile we drive, every mouthful of food we eat has a direct — harmful — impact on the natural world. At the very least we owe the natural world our conscious and deliberate attention. And that begins with robins.
Header image: a dunnock by Zsuzsanna Bird