ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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Their branches that are grinding
Madly together and together,
It is no real fire.
They are breaking each other.
Often I think I should be like
The single tree, going nowhere,
Since my own arm could not and would not
Break the other. Yet by my broken bones
I tell new weather.
While not as birdy as some edgelands places (cf. sewage farms), weather stations nevertheless seem to be good places to watch avian comings and goings. Maybe it’s the general observational frame of mind we’re in, or the shed – if there is one – that easily doubles as a hide, or simply all of those posts and masts and plinths available for perching, that makes a place like this feel a bit like an unofficial bird reserve. It’s too early in the year here for the curlews and oystercatchers and lapwings, which are still feeding out in the estuaries of the bay, but atop the mast, a starling continues to work its way through a low-key, late-winter version of its collaged song, a cut-and-paste job made out of curlew calls, assorted rattles and hisses and metallic clicks.
Starlings are keen mimics, the mynah birds of the north (to which they are related). They’re the samplers among our avifauna, able to incorporate all manner of human, animal and mechanical sounds into their repertoire, and urban starlings are well-known copyists of telephones and doorbells, even dial-up modems. The song-learning process in birds is well studied, but still somewhat mysterious: researchers in this field believe that understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie imitative song-learning is the Holy Grail. But imagine a starling that enriches its individual repertoire by imitating some distinct and regular mechanical noise. This ability might crystallise into the vocal performance of a mature adult, and so might also be copied both by direct offspring and other impressionable, immature birds looking to extend their own vocal abilities. Starlings have been observed at abandoned human settlements recreating the noises of former human or mechanical activity: a squeaky water pump, even though the pump is long seized up, or the rasp of a bandsaw, even though the woodshed is long deserted. Could it be that the starlings that gather here sing a song made from bits of the area’s former soundscape? These low hills were once the site of much industrial activity, dating back to Roman times, and the landscape hereabouts is littered with the sites of limekilnsand forges. Dirty, unpleasant work. The area has always been a kind of edgelands, but could it be possible that starlings still carry within their complicated songs some of the sound elements of that former industrial world? Thought of this way, the birds themselves are a kind of information storage system, a winged databank.
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