Do Birds Sing?

I live in Angus on the east coast of Scotland, above the big fjords of the Forth and Tay, just where the land starts to lean out into the North Sea. Around 6200 BC, a massive failure of the Norwegian continental shelf caused a giant tsunami which swept south and west for hundreds of miles, reaching our coastline in a matter of hours, swamping estuaries and river valleys and barging far inland. As it seeped back, in what had been the soft, grassy bed of a slowing burn, it left a wide scooped-out bowl. The Montrose Basin is now a vast, almost entirely enclosed expanse of slab and mudflat. Twice a day when the tide comes in, it is a shallow, temporary sea.

Needless to say it bristles with birdlife: all migrant species of the North Atlantic are present, sometimes en masse. Each October around 100,000 pinkfoot geese make landfall here as they head south from Iceland and the Faroes. Their call, clear amid the rattling of thousands of wings, is a streaming ‘ink-ink’ – giving rise maybe to their local name: kwink. There is a very satisfying glimpse here of the moment that the bird was named; of someone trying to fit their mouth to what they heard in their landscape, tuning consonants and vowels until they arrived at a deft, self-explanatory sound-image of that thing over there, that creature whose arrival alters the soundscape so significantly, and leaves with such clamour.

Such words have currency. Bird lists for countries round the North Sea rim show a similar attention to sound – the first and easiest means of identifying them at distance – and to sound-in-place. Kwink is also used of the greylag and Brent goose, klekk or claikis of the barnacle goose (less of a chiming, more of a squawk). Old Norse, the language of the Vikings and ancestor of modern Scandinavian languages, is also the root of many peculiarly Shetlandic, Orcadian and Scots words. Names, like the birds, also crossed the North Sea. A seagull is a maa in Orkney and a meeuw in the Netherlands; the curlew a whaup in Caithness and Berwick and a wulp on the mudflats at Westhoek. And if you string their names together, you can almost hear the birds arriving and settling on these northern beaches as the tide turns and their feeding grounds are exposed:

fulmar    mallimak – maali – mallemuk     – qaqulluk
kittiwake    facky – kitto – rittock – rita – krykkje
golden plover    weeo – hjejle – heiđloa – ló – heilo
redshank    pleep – weeweep – stellit – stelkur – tureluur

The idea of a language of the birds was already old when it appeared in Norse myth. This was the belief that birdsong and human speech were sometimes so close that certain gifted individuals could cross from one to the other. This is a seductive theory. In 1857, hauling through the Pentland Firth aboard the Fox, Captain Francis McClintock likened the ‘hoarse screams and unintelligible dialect’ of the Orkney pilots to the sound of the sea birds that mobbed them, ‘as if we had suddenly awoke in Greenland itself’. And in the online database Tobar an Dualchais/Kist o Riches, two recordings from the late 1950s demonstrate an old established belief in the adjacency of human and bird song. In wax cylinder recordings, Mrs Annie Johnston of Barra integrates the ‘conversation’ of the thrush, the lark, the crow, the gull and the dove into her own Gaelic. In another, her husband, Mr Calum Johnston, sings a Pilliù, an ancient caoine or keening song. The Pilliù mimics the long call and syllables of the redshank. Of these kinds of singing, says ethnologist Mairi McFadyen, ‘the dividing lines between bird-song, music and speech are impossible to determine’.

Poets and writers have long been alert to the blurry synthesis of language and landscape. In A Part of Speech, Joseph Brodsky describes the Baltic marshland of his childhood with its ‘zinc-grey breakers that marched on / in twos. Hence all rhymes, hence the wan flat voice’. Norman MacCaig’s Aunt Julia spoke her Hebridean Gaelic with ‘a seagull’s voice’, her speech and movement growing out of the very matter of her island-world:

She was buckets
and water flouncing into them.
She was winds pouring wetly
round house-ends.

Shetland poet Roseanne Watt talks of ‘writing in two languages’, English and Shaetlan, ‘a form of Scots shaped by sea roads… On a sonic level, Shaetlan reflects its landscape; hard and open, yet with constant fluctuations of light. I like this wilderness inside it; the way it occupies a poem’s heart.’

‘Now let us look below the surface,’ says Michael Donaghy, ‘to something I find far more mysterious’. In his wonderful essay Wallflowers, Donaghy argues that the oral tradition is the absolute centre of gravity of all poetry, and the origin of poetic form: ‘poetic rhythm precedes both our visual and auditory fields ... it’s hard-wired into our brains’. And form – in poetry, in music, in dance – is the root and the starting point for innovation. Like chicks inside the egg, we humans begin to recognise sound patterns before we are born, so that from day one we are expert at recognising aural cues and patterned sound – rhythm, volume, repetition, emphasis, even rhyme and alliteration. These patterns and qualities embed us within our audience. They are what makes our language deeply performative, and deeply musical.

In poetic (i.e. innovative, creative) language, says Julia Kristeva, this ‘play’ with the bodily, performative qualities of speech is front-and-centre. Language, she shows, is intrinsically a poetic system. We knowingly manipulate pattern and repetition, metaphor and metonymy, rhythm and timbre, gesture and pitch, to create new meanings or provoke ‘shock’ recognitions of old ones. We abide and transgress, with a wink to our audience. We stretch conventions to breaking point. The traditional aural techniques of verse, says Michael Donaghy, the mnemonics of rhyme, metre, and rhetorical schemes, are grown directly from a community’s oral tradition; their performative musical qualities burn poetry deeper than prose. And, like a singer adopting a song, or a poet testing the boundaries of language, ‘a player in such a tradition is expected to improvise, to “make it new”, and the possibilities for expression within the prescribed forms are infinite’.

Tonight as I type this, a rush of starlings is circling the chimneys, landing every so often the roof outside my window. I hear them mimic and improvise around all the sounds of the street – curlews, doorbells, my neighbour unlocking his car. It is hard not to think of their racket as a thrashing-out and putting-to-bed of all that happened in the village today. A clamour of excited recognition, repetition, reformulation, corruption, dismissal.

In 2018, the old Court House building here in Arbroath was taken over for a month by an eccentric and truly revelatory exhibition. Natural Selection was put together by Andy Holden, a conceptual and video artist, with his father Peter, a veteran ornithologist, author and TV presenter. The bulk of the show was a recreation of an illegal cache of more than 7,000 birds’ eggs that had been confiscated by the police. In the upstairs witness rooms, replica ceramic eggs spilled across shelves and floors, in boxes, trays and biscuit tins, large and small, in every subtle hue and pattern. (The actual cache was destroyed by the police.)

The exhibition examined our human-centric thinking around birds, including how we interpret behaviours such as nest-building and ‘song’. Birdsong, said Peter, is a continually evolving record of place, and so it is at its heart a creative expression. The singer is constantly testing the relevance of its song against the weather, the local acoustic, the influx or absence of other birds, sub-aural sound, fluctuations in air pressure, irruptions in their territory or sensory environment. ‘Its song is constantly becoming,’ said Andy; ‘it is a momentary record of the production of meaning, rather than a presentation of meaning-to-be-thought.’

And what might they be saying? We identify dialects, we record how songs change over distance, over time. We take a classic functionalist approach, linking these to territory, group identity, finding a mate. But how much do we ignore when we latch on to the familiar? And why do we disregard our own first response – of astonishment, that I should have witnessed this thing here, in this place. This astonishment, which precedes and frames interpretation, is the first act in all instances of noticing.

This should be our starting point when describing other species, argues zöomusicologist Hollis Taylor. Recording, whether with language or with a fancy device, is fundamentally an act of self-projection; a personal, passionate act. Using artistic gesture or rich, figurative language to describe what we see places us alongside the non-human world and draws attention to how our lived worlds overlap. This is the only ethical strategy open to us now, says Taylor. And it points to the truth that their world continues far beyond the limits of our imagination, our conceptual structures, and even our recording equipment.

A side room of Natural Selection was given over to small turned wood models of the sonograms of several bird calls. I tried to imagine what sort of size the models would be if they were scaled up to match the song’s actual depth and reach. One November up by Loch Fleet I was rooted to the spot by the boom of a bittern, which had been blown well off course and was sending out its polite oboe notes from the far shore, almost two miles away across cold, open water. In the evening air its call rolled round the empty hills. If I could have boomed back, I would have.


Eurasian bittern, recorded by Niels Krabbe. www.xeno-canto.com

Do birds sing?

Musicology, a discipline that originated within the classical European tradition, now encompasses interdisciplinary research into all and any musical form, expression and culture. The growing field of zöomusicology examines whether the ‘musical’ sounds made by other species can be truly thought of as music; that is, as an aesthetic activity, performed to some extent purely for its own intrinsic artistic value. I’m thinking of the sustained, melodic solo given by a thrush of a late-summer evening in next-door’s rowan. Its joyous, overflowing stream of notes, full of exuberance and embellishment, do seem to be a singing just for the pleasure of it. But how would we know?

Composer Emily Doolittle thinks that we should reframe the question. Rather than starting with this classical definition of aesthetic activity, we should instead look for a non-human-centric common ground. Taking birdsong as an example, Doolittle identifies several outward traits it shares with human composition. Both are learned and developed in a social context in collusion with other members of the group. Both are performed for a knowing audience. In both, other singers – as a group or individually – will repeat and revise songs, creating new traditions which might in time co-exist with or come to replace the old version.

But what would the bird’s definition look like? How many of their key criteria would we meet? Is exuberance and excess key to the thing? Or is their song only a song when it is sung at a certain time, in a certain light, from a certain height so that it carries out across the whole village? What would a starling say?

When we perform a dance step, a part in a play, a song, a poem, says Michael Donaghy, for that moment ‘we give it a body to live in. We own a poem, or at least our expression of it in a profoundly deeper way than is possible if it is stored on a page.’ A poem is ‘a repository of wisdom, or wonder, or presence, if only by virtue of its own excellence. If its words are ingrained into our memories they’re constantly available to our unconscious, like a computer program running in the background... they can guide us out of our emptiness.’

I wonder if there is something in the idea of place. Like a chick in the egg or a babe in the womb, we hear not just through our ears but through the bones in our head. How we form and perform language, the words we choose, our emphases and pauses, reflect the local acoustic and our instinct for how our sound will carry. Sitting here among my papers I am listening for the sounds and cadence of the lines, for hidden rhymes, and how all these things naturally fall.

These things become their own seduction. In the same way a poem suddenly finds its own form, I can imagine the blackbird singing on, long after it needs to, because the light and temperature are perfect, and the pleasure of singing, and the feel inside its body of its own song filling the world, is an ecstasy in itself.

A poetry of self-conscious listening, of placing sound carefully. Like the plover, here I am, sitting on this stone, testing out sounds and patterns in order to record how it is to be here in this now.

Weeo? Hjejle? Lo? Heilo?