Hear the language of the birds

WE share with the birds 50 genes or more to do with sound-making, which leads to the lovely notion that early hominids perched in trees and sang like the feathered things.

- John Lewis-Stempel

Even that most scientific of bods, Charles Darwin, speculated in The Descent of Man that our language commenced with singing. The brainbox philosopher Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, wondered whether the utterances of the birds are superior to human music-making— a higher, inspirational art.

Whatever the reason, be it mutual genetics, similar language structure or artistic stimulus, we are fascinated by birdsong. It does not need to be mellifluous, as James Macdonald Lockhart evidences in Wild Air, his guide to the sounds of eight keynote British birds. He likens the music of a Manx shearwater in its burrow on the Isle of Rum to ‘an underground belch’—ugly, but intriguing. Apart from the burpy shearwater, the other birds profiled are night- jar, dipper, raven, black-throated diver, lapwing and, predictably, skylark and nightingale, the two balladeers most exalted in our avian Top of the Peeps.