A Tweet a day keeps the blues away

Music is returning to my garden. Birds are tuning up for spring.  I stick my head out of the back door into rain and wind and sky the colour of an oil-spill and hear the sweet, sharp sound of a dunnock, like two pieces of polystyrene being rubbed together, though the dunnocks’ song doesn’t make me wince, it makes me grin.  Great-tits are teacher-teacher-ing, robins softly trill, their sound as watery as the winter sun and great spotted woodpeckers pik- pik like squeaky toys.  My shoulders relax, my heart beat slows, my face muscles soften as I tilt my head in different directions to catch each song.

Blackbirds are back in numbers from wherever they’ve been hiding, though silent still.  They’re playing  three-a-side, dribbling apple pieces up and down the lawn. Starlings peck at past-their-sell-by-date mince pies, clicking and whistling like old men adjusting their hearing-aids . 

During a winter bird survey yesterday,we shocked two woodcocks into a zig-zag, wing-whirring, brown-blur flight and chuckled at the site of a moorhen in a tree.  There were also bullfinches, not the usual two or three but – what’s the collective noun for a group of bullfinches?  A ‘plump’ of bullfinches perhaps, or, if you own an apple orchard, a ‘pest’ of bullfinches?  Their soft, sad whistles gave them away.

Birds or, more particularly their songs, may be good for your health.  There’s an interesting article on the internet - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22298779 called Surprising Uses for Birdsong. Recordings of birdsong have been installed in the corridors of Alder Hey Children’s hospital in Liverpool.  Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport uses birdsong in a quiet lounge where people can relax before their flight.  The National Trust suggests people listen to birdsong for a few minutes a day to combat low moods.  Radio Four’s Tweet of the Day is very popular.  If you don’t hear it at 05.58 each morning, you can download the podcast.  Or if like me, you can hardly wait for chiff-chaffs and willow warblers to arrive from Africa, go to the website and listen now!  http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/totd

 

BIRDSONG

Today I helped North East Wales Wildlife with a winter bird survey.  I used the RSPB website to brush up on some bird songs and calls before I went. I tried to make notes on the sounds so I’d remember them in the field, but how do you write down the sound of a bullfinch?  They whistle softly, a sort of wheeet, wheeet, wheeeeeeeeet.  How many ‘E’s is that?  And how do you spell the sound a goldcrest makes, or a flock of goldfinches?

Kim Atkinson paints birdsong.  She sits and listens for half an hour, makes notes and then paints what she’s heard.  Perhaps little dots for a skylark, short thick strokes for crows.  She’s made an art book with Noelle Griffiths which you can see on Youtube, or in the flesh if you visit the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

I find relating the sounds to things helps me to remember them. Long tailed tits sound like tiny football rattles as they clatter overhead in their family flocks.  I can almost taste the sound of a great tit, 'teacher-teacher,' like a metallic filling in my mouth.  Goldfinches tinkle like the wind chimes on my birch tree.  A great spotted woodpecker sounds like someone has trodden on the edge of a squeaky dog toy.  The nuthatch sounds demented, like it’s forgotten where it’s hidden a nut and trying desperately to find it.

I love Simon Barnes’ description of a blackbird’s song from his book; Birdwatching with your eyes closed: ‘Blackbirds whistle.  They whistle almost like a man, leaning dreamily against the wall with his hands in his pockets, not too stressed about his next appointment.’

We did see a male bullfinch, glowing like an ember in a hawthorn tree but he stayed silent.  The golden-penny-leaves of birch trees trembled when long-tailed tits rattled through. And a movement from the corner of my eye turned out to be a tiny,round goldcrest hanging like a Christmas decoration in a tangle of brambles. We gasped with excitement.  I wonder if birds can identify humans by the sounds they make?  ‘Ah, judging from that sound, they’re obviously a flock of bird watchers.’