'Batis and acacia' (c) Dan Wylie |
Most
mornings, for a few months, I’ve been awakened at first light by a rattling
flurry of sharp sound. The cat would startle up; I’d wonder if someone was
knocking, or tossing hard seeds onto the roof... We got to know soon enough
that it's a testosterone-loaded little Cape Batis, very neatly dressed in
black, white and russet suit, but positively furious at seeing his reflection
in the dawn light on the eastern window. You’d think after a couple of weeks he
would twig that this was not a rival male, but a virtual bird, a fake-news
bird, not worth expending all those calories on. But no, self-recognition not
being a strong point, or maybe actually enjoying a kind of gym session, on and
on he goes at it. Sometimes he is joined by an African Paradise-Flycatcher, resplendent
in breeding brick-red colour, or a Dark-capped Bulbul. Are they learning from
each other?
I
wonder if a Klaas’s Cuckoo chick somewhere is being deprived by this
distraction, as the Batis is a prime sucker for the cuckoos to foist their eggs
on – and already I can hear an immigrant cuckoo lilting, My-iki, my-iki in the pines upslope of my cottage, its white belly
making it all but invisible against the paling sky. Nearer to hand, the Batis
churrs and grouses. As Terry Oatley has written, this is a hard sound to
describe; he finds the only satisfying one is C J ‘Jack’ Skead’s, likening it
to pebbles being rolled together. I think of it as more woody than stony, a
sort of rolling gurRRR-rrRRRrrr-rrr.
But it has always been a problem for the bird-guide compilers to describe
bird-song. The old Roberts guide (eds.
McLachan & Liversidge) was quite richly poetic: I think it was the Pel’s
Fishing Owl’s call that was compared to the cry of a desperate soul falling
into the pit of hell! No one ever having heard such a soul, actually, this
would not do for the more recent scientific generation, as represented by Gordon
Maclean, compiler of the 1984 Roberts,
the hefty edition with its handsome maroon dust-jacket. Though the descriptions
of songs became blander, Maclean did include sonograms, little graph-like
diagrams like ECG printouts, which I found very useful in gauging relative
smoothness or harshness of calls, time intervals, and more. In the yet more
recent Roberts field-guide (Chittenden,
2007), much pared down in the interests of making it more convenient to carry
about, the sonograms have disappeared. For the Batis, Maclean repeated the “two stones” notion, as does Chittenden; but without amplification it’s not so
useful. The massive seventh edition
(Hockey et al), despite being 1200 large-format pages long, has done away with
the apostrophe after Roberts, the
sonograms and the stones: the Batis
now says chewarra-warra-warra, which
is quite good, even if it reminds me of Tigger trying unsuccessfully to be
fierce in Winnie the Pooh.
Why do
I even possess these books – alongside two huge volumes of the Bird Atlas project, the two
beautifully-illustrated volumes of Geoff McIlleron and Peter Ginn’s Ultimate Companion, Peter Steyn’s Birds of Prey, a battered Newman’s field guide, and still others?
After all, I am far from being a dedicated “twitcher”, more a sporadic
observer, and these books are far more technical and detailed than I will ever
need. I blame the bird atlas project, which my mother and I participated in for
a time in its first round; that educative experience drew me into buying the
atlases when they were published (obviously, since our names were in the back,
hoo-hah!). Then I bought more, and more... Apparently South Africans buy more
bird books per capita than any other nation on earth. Yet I do like to know who
I’m seeing and attach a name. A name confers a certain intimacy on a raw
observation, allows me to feel more at home and attuned, even if the bird itself
doesn’t give a tiny white poep about
your human sense of intimacy.
The
clumsiness of our attempts to describe birdsong means: dump the books, go out
and listen. There is no experience but the experience. I take a chair onto the
front lawn, look out over the forest tree-tops, the coastal plain beyond, sit and
listen. A certain kind of knowledge and layering of meaning comes from the
books, to be sure; a different kind from memory and experience. A number of
species in this forest also occur in my home forest of eastern Zimbabwe, so are
heavy with evocative memory. And they are all present this crystalline morning,
talking to and past and over and despite one another.
The Batises
(Batii?) are worra-worra-ing and
chirping; White-Eyes chitter in a little group dashing from erythrina to
wild-olive; Dark-capped Bulbuls sound fruity greetings from the leaf-tops of hubris.
These are the little people, but soon along come the royals, first bounding
along the branches, half-kangaroo half-bird, eyebrows strikingly painted white
on green, jungle geishas, then with a growling churr launch through the air
between trees with a flash of wing as crimson as a caesar’s robe. Knysna Louries
– sorry, Turacos (I’m of that generation still stuck with the ‘old’ names). One,
and another, three, and four: then the arching, raucous call: graaah, graaah, graah. My mother used to
say that that call, depending on strength and rhythmic duration, presaged mist
or summer storm. I was a bit dubious: it was both the rainy and the breeding
season, so the two were likely to coincide quite a bit anyway. But it was a little
myth that I nurtured, part of how we identified with and interpreted those who
shared the forest with us. Damn the taxonomists, who now insist that what we
had back in the Vumba were Livingstone’s
turacos, with a slightly pointier crest and a slightly bluer tail. Well, they are
like enough, and remain as magnificently aristocratic and broad-voiced,
aristocrats and criers of rain.
There
are other littlies who will talk down kings, whose voices are louder than
climate-change denialists’, exceeding their bodily importance a thousand-fold. Most
vociferous this morning is the Bar-throated Apalis; I think of him as
frenchified, dapper and lively and piping Phil-IPPE,
phil-IPPE, phil-IPPE. The indefatigable Jack Skead noticed that some individuals’
throat bars were thicker than others. Theories competed like waxbills at a
birdbath. Was it dimorphic? Was it a sex symbol, like a flashier cravat? Was it
just that the feathers lay at different angles at different times? Lately, it’s
said that a thicker bar signifies greater territory and dominance. How would
that even work? OK, my territory is one
hundred and twelve wingbeats wide, let me add two millimetres to my bar, like
a corporal promoting himself to a sergeant? There remain profound mysteries in
such relationships between colour and behaviour.
The middle classes are also coming into voice: Lesser
Striped Swallows taking an interest in my back porch with little gazoo-like
squeaks; Rock Pigeons’ chesty love-notes on the roofline; one Southern Boubou
shranking out a sound like shook foil, answered by another with a high bright
cry, clearer than a bell. Forget your legend- and poetry-saturated English lark
and nightingale – colourless calls in comparison with our Oriole’s ringing clarion,
or the Burchell’s Coucal’s falling-and-rising bubbling, somewhere between
clarinet and harp. It is an orchestra this morning, albeit one thoroughly
disorganised and aleatory. A clatter of vociferous Redwinged Starlings, too,
creaking and glurping and scolding the cat. They're often accused of excessive
aggression, but none of my books mention that they mourn. I once saw a group, on a road in town, surrounding the body
of a flock member that had been killed by a car. They said little or nothing
for a while; then by some secret signal one starling hopped forward and covered
the body in a flurry of frantic shivering feathers and wings. This was
explained to me as a pseudo-sexual act, perhaps a futile effort to revive the
dead; but, as that individual backs off and, after a quiet interval, another
comes forward and does the same, it looks more like a ritual, respectful and
concerned and arranged.
Who is this - Steppe Buzzard? |
Now the thermals rise with a seaborne sough, bringing in some
of the big guys: raptors. Never all at once, of course, but there is the
drawn-out kwheee of a Long-crested
Eagle, who is often to be seen perched on poles alongside the cuttings near
town. I can anticipate the sharper yelp of the Jackal Buzzard, or the
spiralling continuous yow-yow-YOW-yow-yow
of a Crowned Eagle displaying and looping for his mate. A little worry for my
cat, who could be easily taken by this huge predator: I have a vivid memory
from the Vumba of a Crowned Eagle snatching a young Somango monkey off an
acacia tree-top right below my bedroom window. And maybe a Fish Eagle will
wander up from a coastal watercourse, to utter that silvery thrilling cry that
is in my memory forever welded with the dawn honking of hippos and the booming
of Ground Hornbills and the powerful silky slide of the Zambezi River.
The thermals are also lifting a cabal of White-necked Ravens
into the lively sky. There are far fewer of them than just a few years ago; has
there been some shift in local migratory patterns, or have too many been
poisoned by farmers putting out toxic carcasses for the odd jackal and rippling
destructively and blindly out into vast ecosystems? At any rate, these croaking
priests of the air are playing on the wind – it is surely playing, a cavorting
that has nothing to do with preparing for a hunt: a revelling in the gift of flight, a passing fixation on formation-flying, an occasional mock aerial joust. In his fascinating book, Pleasurable Kingdom, Jonathan Balcombe
argues that seeking of pleasure is as potent an evolutionary force as Darwinian
competition for resources. Birds, he thinks, enjoy singing; he cites philosopher and ornithologist Charles
Hartshorne:
'Raven Games' (c) Dan Wylie |
There is no conflict between ‘birds
sing for pleasure’ and ‘they sing to maintain territory or attract mates.’ The
more essential an activity in the whole life of the bird, the greater the
proportion of the bird’s pleasure which is realised in that activity.
And it’s just about impossible not to feel that pleasure and pride inflect the singing in the thickets below me of a
Red-capped Robinchat (the old Natal Robin; only a committee could rename a bird
whose cap is not at all red but at best, according to the guides, “cinnamon-brown”).
At any rate, this Robin is going great guns, mimicking a Crowned Eagle, sliding
into a flycatcher screek, a riff of gardener’s lazy whistle, a
couple of inventive sequences of his own, back to a modified snatch of eagle – astonishingly
variable, unique to this individual and,
well, happy. Balcombe also quotes Joseph Wood Krutch, writing in 1956:
When I hear a particular robin
singing on a bough – I do not think: ‘Irritable protoplasm so organized as to
succeed in the struggle for existence’.
I could go on and on, just with what I’ve heard in an hour –
a web of sound-textures melding with the scent of sap rising off complexities
of vegetation as the day heats up. In our addled, politicised, monetised world,
the birds are my distraction, solace, unselfconscious Mercurys of wisdom and
unalloyed delight. So many people are oblivious to all this; even most of my
eco-literature students have proven woefully ignorant of the extraordinary
interlacing of sound and colour, texture and scent that makes up such a multidimensional
sensory experience: their smartphone-centred world, for all its globalised reach,
can come nowhere near to so deeply engaging the complete person.
And without
learning to love all this, how can we know we need to save it, or would want
to?
*****