Birdsong is beautiful, but what does it mean?

An open-air recital is one of the great pleasures of summer. You don your Panama hat and slump into a deck chair with a good glass of wine. As the heat of the day fades, you settle down to enjoy the music.

As for the singer, you cannot do better than a local performer. Opera stars such as Jonas Kaufmann and Anna Netrebko unaccountably refuse to perform for free in back gardens and parks. But blackbirds, thrushes and robins are all up for the gig.

You do not even have to throw a bouquet afterwards. A handful of mealworms will suffice.

Before the pandemic, birdsong was often drowned out by the noise of
cars and aircraft. Then lockdowns turned down the volume. Many of us listened properly to birdsong for the first time in years.

It was a blessed escape during the months of grief and anxiety before vaccines were developed. Here was a parallel world, interlocking with our own, with its own standards of beauty and utility. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a conservation charity, was bombarded with calls and emails demanding to know: “Is there suddenly more nature around?”

Now we are turning the background noise back up again. Let’s hope an appreciation of birdsong — and of wildlife as a source of wellbeing —
will persist.

“It fills the heart with joy,” says Mark Constantine, a birdsong expert and co-founder of cosmetics group Lush. “You could sit in your garden listening until the end of time and never understand birdsong entirely.”

I had turned to Constantine to help answer a question that was bothering me. To humans, birdsong can be beautiful, engaging or beguilingly strange: but what does it mean to the birds?

Artist Gary Larson once drew a cartoon of a scientist whose invention translated barking dogs into English. The only word in the speech bubbles was: “Hey!”

Similarly, animal behaviourist Konrad Lorenz interpreted the contact calls of geese as simply: “Here am I, where are you?” But there is complexity too.

Until he can sing a mating song competently, a young male is, as rappers Run DMC would have put it, ‘a high-school loser who never makes it with ladies’

My favourite backyard arias are performed in the late afternoon by a blackbird perched on the top of a tall tree. His melodious, trilling song stakes out his territory and advertises his vigour as a mate.

Constantine reckons it can take several years for a male blackbird to reach concert standard. Younger birds often practise in lower-pressure venues — inside a bush, for example.

Many songbird species have a canonic version of a mating song that varies from place to place. Until he can sing this competently, a young male is, as rappers Run DMC would have put it, “a high-school loser who never makes it with ladies”.

The standard mating song of a garden bird is a bit like a public profile on a dating website. Constantine prizes more highly his recordings of “ecstatic” mating calls, directed by a male songbird at a single, receptive female. They are faster, quieter and, so far as the term can apply to wild animals, personal.

The antithesis is the ear-splitting alarm call my blackbird unleashes when I surprise him foraging on the ground, equating to: “Stranger danger! Evacuate immediately!”

I could do without this melodrama, frankly. This blackbird knows me. He sees me every day. I feel like saying to him: “OK, someone baked four-and-twenty of your relatives in a pie? Too bad. It’s time you moved on.”

As for starlings, I’m not convinced even these avian absurdists know what their calls really mean. Martin Fowlie of the RSPB has one in his garden that imitates a duck.

A scientist once tried to teach a group of starlings new tunes from recordings. They hand out grants for sillier things, apparently. Rejecting the scientist’s taste in music, the starlings worked up some very convincing imitations of his nervous cough and a tape player switching on and off.

Starling numbers have fallen by about two-thirds since the 1970s. Thanks to habitat loss, most songbirds have suffered similar declines. When
I was a kid, the Dawn Chorus was sometimes so loud it woke me up.

“I remember being blown away by it,” Fowlie says. No longer.

Most shamefully of all for Britons, there has been a catastrophic decline in larks, a bird emblematic of their own lush countryside in summer.

Health regulations now permit us urbanites to drive out of town and enjoy the remarkable display flight of these birds. They flutter slowly down from hundreds of feet above, uncurling their twittering, sibilant streams of song like banners across the sky.

Pick a patch of grass, stretch out, relax and watch them. The challenge is to spot the bird right at the top of its arc, when it is a tiny dot against the blue. You will be participating in a birdwatching tradition that has been going on since Stonehenge was just a Neolithic architect’s concept sketch.

Equally, we can now go to socially distanced concert halls and hear Vaughan Williams’ idyllic “The Lark Ascending”. This popular classical piece evokes dewy-eyed nostalgia for a vanished rural England.

But unless we mend our destructive ways, only the human music will survive. The birds that inspired it will be gone.

Jonathan Guthrie is the head of Lex

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