Bog Myrtle & Peat

Starlings tell us where they’ve been.

Their voices are growing towards spring, and now they produce an endless, chattering babble of song across the farmyard. The birds are talented mimics, and most of their commentary is a remix; a digest of samples borrowed from the world around them. Starlings record and play back with the unthinking simplicity of a dictaphone, caring little for meaning. Brief, fragmentary recordings are spun into a patchwork of natter and fag-ends; listening is like scanning through channels on an old radio, pausing just long enough at each station to identify it before plunging back into meaningless white noise.

The dial pauses for a moment on the rolling staccato drill of an oystercatcher. The copy is pitch-perfect, and the loan implies that these birds have been down to the sea. Excerpts of lapwing and curlew follow. These were gleaned from days spent in wet winter fields by the merse. There are some ambiguous squeals from a kestrel, then the jittering trill of kittiwake before an abrupt descent into strange, indecipherable crackling like cords of burning pine.

Sometimes the sounds are too literal, and I hear the telephone ringing from the harbour, five miles away. It’s an old fashioned ‘phone, and you don’t hear that shrill “drring” much these days, but the boss is going deaf and has cranked up the volume so he can hear it in his yard. Starlings gather in an old sycamore above the portacabin where the telephone is kept. Here is the source of infection, brighter than any plastic tag or satellite transmitter.

The sound almost sends me running for the house to see who is calling, but listen closely and you’ll find faults on the line; something has been misheard or imperfectly rendered. Cracks in the rhythm show that there is no sense in this song – the second “drring” is a “rring”.

It’s just a jumble of scraps after all, strung together without meaning to fill silence and perhaps impress a mate. I look to the line of little black tinkers standing along the pitch of the old shed roof like clothes pegs. The singers are transfixed with the fun of it, bristling their beards and exhaling a treasure-trove.

For birds that sing all the time, they don’t have much to say for themselves.