On a clear spring morning like this the dawn chorus is at its peak. There are surely few more enchanting natural soundscapes than this. But this avian choir does not sing for us. These are songs of seduction and weapons of war. Males are defending territory and attracting mates. Attenborough’s Wonder of Song ***** BBC 2022
Song 2 United Kingdom Great Tit 1970s: We suspected that songs could be weapons of war, but it was the next recording that proved it … Female great tits do not sing. ibid.
Song 3 Germany Nightingale 2010s: A male singing for a mate … females do not sing … Up to 250 songs … Better singers are better fathers. ibid.
Song 4 Australia Superb Lyrebird 1930s: Amazes me every time I hear it … The talent a lyrebird has for mimicry … at least 20 different species … [and] incorporates other sounds he hears in the forest. ibid.
Song 5 Australia Superb Fairy-Wren 1980s: It’s extremely promiscuous … It’s not just the male that sings. ibid.
Song 7 Hawaii Kauai O O: There are few songs more haunting that this … since been declared extinct. ibid.
How many more songs have been lost on other parts of the planet? ibid.
Once they’ve fledged, Sooty Terns spend the first four years of their lives on the wing. Life on Fire: Pioneers of the Deep: Jeremy Irons narrator, PBS 2013
Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican!
His beak holds more than his belican.
He takes in his beak
Food enough for a week.
But I’ll be darned if I know how the helican. Dixon Lanier Merritt
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Percy Bysshe Shelley, To a Skylark, 1819
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest. ibid.
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight. ibid.
Like a Poet hidden
In the shade of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. ibid.
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest – but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety. ibid.
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought. ibid.
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then – as I am listening now. ibid.
A widow bird sat mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles the First 5:9
O blithe new-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice:
O Cuckoo! Shall I call the bird,
Or but a wandering voice? William Wordsworth, To the Cuckoo, 1807
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred point of heaven and home! William Wordsworth, To a Skylark
The largest bird that ever lived – the twelve-foot high Moa. Excavations all over South Island produce the massive bones of the Moa. Flocks of their skeletons dominate New Zealand’s museums. The Moa certainly seems to have been seen as late as 1860. Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World
Birds are part of the heritage we are fighting for. James Fisher, preface Watching Birds
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead. John Keats, On the Grasshopper and Cricket, 1817
I had a dove and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand’s weaving. John Keats, I Had a Dove, 1819
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, –
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain —
To thy high requiem become a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown. ibid.
There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see. Nat Burton, The White Cliffs of Dover
The lark now leaves his wat’ry nest
And, climbing, shakes his dewy wings. William D'Avenant, 1606-68, The Lark, 1638
Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,
Since o’er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men. John Webster, The White Devil
We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry. ibid.
On a tree by a river a little tom-tit
Sang, ‘Willow, titwillow, titwillow!’
And I said to him, ‘Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing, Willow, titwillow, titwillow?’ W S Gilbert, The Mikado
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven, 1845
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore’. ibid.
The Attic warbler pours her throat,
Responsive to the cuckoo’s note,
The untaught harmony of spring. Thomas Gray, Ode on the Spring, 1748
Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people's gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
I know why the caged bird sings! Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1872-1906, adopted by Maya Angelou for title of autobiography
The carrion crow, that loathsome beast,
Which cries against the rain. George Gascoigne c.1534-77
Those little nimble musicians of the air that warble forth their curious ditties with which nature hath furnished them to the shame of art. Izaac Walton, 1593-1683
The nightingale, if she should sing by day,
When every goose is cackling, would be thought
No better a musician than the wren.
How many things by season seasoned are
To their right praise and true perfection! William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice V I 104