Another summer gone and not a corncrake heard, not a cuckoo. Nowadays you have to go and search in known areas. A few decades ago, the corncrake was not unknown even close to city boundaries. A haunting sound at night used to be the call of curlews going down to the seashore from the mountains. Maybe now the din of the city is such, even late into the night, that their lovely plaintive notes are lost in it. What would we do without birds and their song? One of the most haunting images in English poetry is in Keats: The sedge has withered from the lake. And no birds sing. And no birds sing. Even people with no great interest in birds have to be aware of some of the pearls cast before them.
Here in Ireland, we do not have the nightingale, which many regard with reverence. One friend has an unfailing remedy when he cannot sleep at night. He switches on a disc "Rossignols: A Nocturne of Nightingales" - over an hour of some 13 of the birds recorded mostly in France, but also in the delta of the Danube and in the south of Finland. And in the background are sounds from the habitat in which the birds were recorded: frogs, owls, church bells. Cicadas maybe. All that might be heard in woodland edges, marshland or treed areas.
We do not have nightgales in Ireland, but we have wonderful songsters. There was a time when a friend used to go out in his own big garden in the spring dawn to record the song thrush greet the day. And there is such sweetness in the song of the blackbird, in some ways the handsomest of all garden visitors, for his black has a curious warmth in its blackness, set off by his brilliant yellow beak. Skylarks are said, at times, to be in decline. But writers on birds, as Cabot and Dempsey and O'Clery, mention no decline.
And next to the nightingale, surely the skylark is the most noted by poets. Ferguson: Dear thoughts are in my mind, / And my soul soars enchanted, / As I hear the sweet lark sing. / In the clear air of the day. And Shelley: Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit, / Bird thou never wert. and later, the line And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest. Lord Grey of Falloden wrote a book The Charm of Birds. And one of the best chapters is headed Joy Flights and Joy Sounds.
Y