The turtle dove’s aeolian song

One was calling immediately we arrived. The song came on the wind, lost when the breeze got up to a susurration in the grasses and trees, but then clear and gently there. It came and went for just long enough to confirm what we thought we’d heard, something of an aeolian making.

There are some birds my wife and I seek out every year, now with our young daughter too. They are the markers of seasons, and intimate elements of those places we have come to know so well in our home county of Kent. In winter we hope for fieldfares, Arctic swans, and short-eared owls. In spring, nightingales arrive in late April to the ancient Wealden forests nearby, swifts arrive suddenly and nest in the eaves of the old houses in our street, cuckoos and nightjars sing and breed in scrubland just down the road.

Of all these birds, though, it might be the turtle dove we yearn for most. Regrettably, we seek turtle doves each year because we fear each year might be the last. Nearly all the birds that come to our shores for one season or another are in trouble, but the turtle dove is in such serious jeopardy that there is a very real chance this species will be extinct in the UK before my daughter has a chance to see, hear, know this bird for herself.

Turtle dove, north Kent marshes, 30/05/18

Turtle doves have declined by 91% since 1995. That’s well within my lifetime. I’m not old enough to recall a time when this species was ever plentiful, but I know they are harder and harder to find in general. Where we live in Kent there is lots of ideal habitat for them, with expansive, untidy hedgerows and shaw boundaries between fields. And yet the birds just aren’t here. It feels deserted. Turtle doves, more than any other bird, make me think of a lost legacy I have never experienced, and never will: the overwhelming abundance of life and song and colour that once was.

For now, at least, we know one or two untidy spots in the north of our county where we can still hear turtle doves. Momentarily we can forget the sombre narrative of loss and enjoy the hazy summer evocation of their song. All our pigeon species convey something of this: it’s in the ease and rhythm of a wood pigeon’s throaty cooing, or even the collared dove’s early-morning tiresome intonation. But it’s the turtle dove’s purring, like a chorister’s tongue-rolled ‘rrrrr’ or contented feline slumber, that most conjurs high-summer, drowsy days. Everything about turtle doves seems understated. Their song is soft and delicate, and their uncertain futures as fragile, as their suffuse, exquisite plumage.

Estuary ahead and scrub behind us, where we found our second turtle dove.

That day we found the birds was scorching August-heat at the end of May. We moved further along the coast for lunch, and settled for an hour or two between estuary creeks and dense hawthorn scrub. A lone nightingale gave a late-season burst, and then, just audible on the wind, another turtle dove’s pink purring song.


Birds in English Place-Names

I’m currently writing a book on birds, nature and place in our medieval past. It’s a nature book as a much as a work about medieval literature and culture. The narrative takes me all over Britain, exploring how people understood and connected to the natural world in the Middle Ages. Currently, in my first chapter, I’m on home turf in Kent writing about birdy towns and villages (including my home town, Cranbrook). I hope to post something of what I’ve produced soon, but for now, here’s a blog post on the subject of birds in place names that I wrote at the end of last year for Boydell and Brewer:

The winter stare of a short-eared owl

I’d never have found them two minutes later. I watched them, a pair, drop to ground after twenty minutes working the field and hedgerows and there achieve an instant metamorphosis—bird become sullen vegetation. Fixed on the spot where they went down, I located them only by their intensely yellow irises, stark and astonishing against indistinguishable feather-scrub, like a night creature’s eerily luminous eyes in singular darkness.


Short-eared owls are always a remarkable and special winter sight. They breed in northern and Scottish uplands, but their numbers are swelled from autumn onwards when continental birds disperse to new territories across the rest of more southerly Britain. Some years bring so many birds that every likely patch of land for hunting seems to have a resident pair (one year the small common just across from my in-laws, right on the edge of a busy town, had a pair that hunted each evening right among the regular dog-walkers).

Photo: Wikipedia Commons.

The owls’ seasonal appearance makes them particularly associative of shortening, colder days. Their cryptic plumage is somehow the stuff of winter itself: matched to the subtleties and gradations of arctic tundra. It is the drab beauty of earth and grass intricacy; winter browns of loam and thorn, sedge, stubble and reed. It’s those facial markings, too, which conjure for me the year’s darkening nights—that black smudging mask framing the eyes has something of a Gothic, All Hallows spectre, a ghoulish stare that is unyielding and severe as winter itself.

Mist coming in over the owl field. Beeding Brooks, Sussex, 27th December 2018

That evening mist came in quickly as the sun set. It seemed to generate and rise from the earth itself, as though the field steamed with optimistic warmth. The cows became monoliths, their dark, head-down bulks forming a stone henge. To the south-east where St Peter’s church stands on a knoll, I could hear the jackdaws’ nightly Tenebrae in the tall stands of beech tree either side of the rectory. The birds continued to drift across from the west, their black forms like bonfire fragments in the red sky. Periodically and suddenly, the growing roost broke to an explosive cackling as thousands of jackdaws took flight before settling again minutes later.

By contrast, the owls hunted on in complete silence, easy and elegant on long, languid wings. The mist in the last minutes of light had consumed the whole field and the owls’ ghostly figures dissolved into whiteness.



Interview on my book



Do animals receive enough attention in medieval scholarship? 












The miraculous mimicry of a jay

Two days ago I was very excited to receive advance copies of my brand new book.


It’s been way too long since I last posted, so I think the advent of my book’s publication is an appropriate excuse to offer something now as a preview into one of the chapters. Here, then, is a little something based on chapter two, which is all about transforming trickster birds in an astounding collection of Old English riddles that only survives–and might have only ever existed–in one manuscript from the 10th century, known as the Exeter Book because it’s been at the cathedral in that city for probably all its lifetime. One of these riddle birds is a jay. A talking jay.

In recent years there’s been a lot of focus on birds’ remarkable vocal abilities. This year, as it happens, is the ‘Year of the Bird‘ for the National Geographic. Their range of articles has sought to celebrate the colourful diversity of bird life, and one focuses specifically on birds’ cognitive abilities, exploring how ingenious and imaginative some species can be.

Not surprisingly, corvids feature pretty heavily. It’s well-known that corvids top the smart bird charts because of their comparatively large forebrains with densely packed neurons. In the article, an eight-year-old girl named Gabi has befriended American crows visiting her garden who habitually bring her gifts. Corvid species, more than any other genus of bird, have demonstrated all sorts of remarkable functions (see here, here and here–for a bit of fun!) that parallel the ‘unique’ capabilities that supposedly set us humans above other creatures.

bird wing beak museum blue black dead feather fauna crow plumage close up ornithology scary rook head stuffed vertebrate raven exhibit preserve exhibition scavenger taxidermy preservation evil carrion sinister corvus american crow perching bird crow like bird omen portent scavenging
Jackdaw. Source: pxhere.

Knowledge of this ingenuity is by no means new, of course. It’s just that scientific studies now are proving the hunches or proverbial lore that has surrounded these species for millennia. Above all, it’s corvine mimcry that most captivates us, not only as a source of marvel, but because it raises questions about our own linguistic abilities. The Greeks and Romans certainly came across talking corvids. I particularly like an anecdote from Plutarch about a barber’s pet jay renowned for its vocal skills (which I came across in Jeremy Mynott’s new book), which one day, upon hearing a trumpet fanfare, falls silent for a period of time. The town’s people cannot fathom what has happened, until it reveals that it was only ‘withholding its mimetic skill while it adjusted and refashioned its voice like a musical instrument. For suddenly its voice returned … and there rang out the music of the trumpets, reproducing all its sequences and every variation in melody and rhythm’.[1]

These abilities are certainly no exaggeration. Jays have a repertoire that can encompass a wide range of other bird species, ‘and a motorbike horn, human voice, whistled songs, barking dog, and (probably) lawnmower’.[2] (See here for a jay mimicking a buzzard.)

When it comes to medieval knowledge of corvid mimicry, there are no shortage of examples again. One piece of classical writing on magpies, by the Roman poet Martial, was certainly known to medieval writers. He has the bird itself tell us that ‘if you did not see me, you would deny that I am a bird’ (Epigram 76). The point here, of course, is that the bird is such a good mimic that one needs to actually have the bird in sight to confirm that it is indeed a bird. It’s this aspect of avian brilliance that I love about Exeter Book Riddle 24 (see here for the Riddle in the original manuscript), which I write about in chapter two of my book.

Ic eom wunderlicu wiht,     wræsne mine stefne,
hwilum beorce swa hund,     hwilum blæte swa gat,
hwilum græde swa gos,     hwilum gielle swa hafoc,
hwilum ic onhyrge      þone haswan earn,
guðfugles hleoþor,      hwilum glidan reorde
muþe gemæne,      hwilum mæwes song,
þær ic glado sitte.     . ᚷ. mec nemnað,
swylce . ᚫ. ond . ᚱ.      . ᚩ. fullesteð,
. ᚻ. ond . ᛁ .     Nu ic haten eom
swa þa siex stafas      sweotule becnaþ.
(Riddle 24)

[I am a wondrous creature. I vary my voice: sometimes bark like a dog, sometimes bleat like a goat, sometimes honk like a goose, sometimes yell like a hawk, sometimes I mimic the ashy eagle—cry of the warbird—sometimes the kite’s voice I speak with my mouth, sometimes the gull’s song, where I sit gladly. G they name me, also Æ and R. O helps, H and I. Now I am called as these six letters clearly indicate.]

The solution to Riddle 24 is definitely a corvid species, because the speaker tells us so: those funny letters which look like something out of Lord of the Rings are Germanic runes–the Anglo-Saxon alphabet from before the days of the Roman alphabet–and when re-arranged correctly they spell out higoræ (Old English for jay, though sometimes translated as magpie). This jay gives a virtuosic performance that suggests to us how tricky, even inadvisable, it can be to categorise and label species with particular characteristics that neatly separate them from all other creatures. As the jay shows us, comically, you can get yourself tied in knots doing this! A mimicking bird is the perfect subject to get across this idea because it can convincingly incorporate the ‘unique’ voices of other creatures into its vocal range in a way that makes things we thought were defining and distinguishable the very opposite–indistinguishable! A jay’s voice is a jay’s voice, but also a goat’s, and a hawks, and a dog’s, and a goose’s, and … . I imagine how this Riddle would change over time as jays in different centuries respond to different stimuli around them. (I think here of the well-known Attenborough clip of the lyrebird mimicking modern man-made sounds).

A medieval jay (gai). Source: Sherborne Missal (British Library, Add MS 74236).

So this Anglo-Saxon jay mimics other nonhuman voices. Interestingly, the human voice is not included in its repertoire. But I like to think this bird has another trick under its wing. You see, it’s very easy to assume that animals and objects being represented in the Exeter Book Riddles are personified: they usually speak in the first person voice as if they actually have a human voice. Once we remember, though, that we are dealing with no ordinary creature in this particular Riddle, but one that is renowned for mimicking even the human voice, the boundaries change again. The human speaker reciting the poem (and let’s remember that medieval poems were often read out loud) actually becomes one of the many voices adopted by the jay, thus craftily integrating the human voice that at first sight seems to be absent from its list. The jay is not personified, but is actually speaking the poem! This jay with its astonishing vocal abilities, like the magpie in Martial’s epigram, plays a game of hide-and-seek with us. If we did not see it, we would not believe it was a bird.

[1] For a selection of other classical sources dealing with mimicking birds, see Jeremy Mynott, Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 143-9.

[2] Stanley Cramp, gen. ed., Birds of the Western Palearctic, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977-94), vol. 8, pp. 19-20.

A bittern booming in the mire

It’s easy to imagine why some birds appeal so well to our myth-conjuring habits. I think particularly of those species that make a skill of obscurity. Crepuscular birds excel in shadow—the nightjar or woodcock are no more than ghostly silhouettes in dusk-dark. By day you’ve not a chance—their plumage is the very stuff of earth, intricate and cryptic patterns of leaf-litter, mulch, soil.

The bird that most comes to mind for these evasive sleights, though, is the bittern. It does not need darkness; this bird has perfected invisibility in specialist reed bed living. The woodcock’s argillaceous plumage is matched in the bittern by habitat imitation so effective it is remarkable no origin myths have passed down to tell of how the bird sheared from reed in metamorphosis, ripped up from the very same material in which it skulks. It’s colour and striations mimic the close, vertical world of marsh and fen exactly, especially so when the bird lifts its beak right up, narrows itself to reed-thinness and sways gently with the wind-rustling stems.

A well-camouflaged bittern. Image: Wikipedia Commons.

This morning I’ve been waiting since dawn at Ham Wall RSPB reserve for the briefest of glimpses. It’s April and I can hear one male booming—a sonorous, eerie bass note that carries over a mile. It’s this aspect of the bird, in fact, that humans have responded to for millennia. The many dialect terms for the bittern show alliterative playfulness with the bird’s reverberations: butter bump, bog bumper, bog blutter. These marvellous names go way back. In the Anglo-Saxon age, when King Alfred was hiding out here on the swampy Levels, the bird was a raredumle, probably meaning  something like ‘reed-boomer’. By the late Middle Ages, the vernacular term was miredromble, but the English language also adopted French bitour, which became ‘bittern’. The strange booming spurred inventive explanations about how ‘a bitore bombleth in the myre’ by lowering its head ‘unto the water doun’ (Chaucer), or blowing through a reed. Inevitably, the supernatural aspect of the disembodied noise associated it with omen and disaster.

Image: RSPB

The old names alert us to the priority given to bird sound in the past, and even now the bittern is certainly a bird more encountered by its unique call than sight. Its presence in the once extensive marshes of Britain bred inventive myths down the centuries. Here on the Levels, bitterns stalked the prehistoric swamps alongside pelicans, cranes and white-tailed eagles. Neolithic tracks across the marsh still exist, preserved in peat beneath the watery landscapes recreated in recent years. What did our prehistoric ancestors make of the bittern’s booming call? What was their word for the bird? We’ll never know, but surely they were equally struck by its eldritch presence. Perhaps those medieval myths and names reach back this far.

Like many of Britain’s fen and marshland birds, the bittern became extinct. It recolonised in the early twentieth century after an absence of 50 years, but numbers remained low and as recently as 1997 there were only 11 booming males. Thanks to hard conservation work, 46 males have been estimated calling on the Avalon Marshes this spring in Somerset alone, the densest population anywhere in the country. Our names and myths recall how elemental bitterns are to this habitat, as much as reed and peat and water. It is joyously encouraging that a bird so intimately rooted in these special places is not lost.

RSPB Ham Wall reserve, April 2018

Bird in the snow: another way to look at a blackbird

This week brought in the birds to us, made bold in numbers and cheek by the short arctic visitation, just when we were expecting spring to start murmuring from below ground. Snow had come overnight and the first morning filled our room with a brilliancy of light that seemed like snow itself. The world was distilled, snow perfecting light to the very tip of purest white.

View over Cranbrook towards the Union windmill from our bedroom window first thing on 27th February.

If there is anything that can intensify such whiteness further, it’s the male blackbird that is here each time I come to the window to show our five-week-old daughter the hushed and strange outside. In truth it is one of several nearby, but it’s always a single bird that comes to our balcony. The utter blackness of its plumage is both a sharp presence and absence in the snow. For long periods of time he seems to stare intently at us, snow-light reflected in his black eye.

In the American poet Wallace Stevens’ famous ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird‘, the final image depicts the onset of snow one evening, and a blackbird in a cedar tree. Our blackbird comes next, the morning after, when the snow has fallen thick, and the bird perches in the stuff itself. Another way to look at a blackbird. And snow.

Beneath this monochrome beauty, though, lies a stark reality. What brings the blackbird to us, and its cousins the redwings and fieldfares, is thrush hunger for easy pickings in these suddenly cold days. In the nonhuman world, snow means tough living, and very possibly, death.

It’s different for most of us, of course, particularly here in southern Britain where heavy snow fall is a scarce and magnificent event, short-lived and affording quick pleasures whilst it lasts. There’s a carnival aspect to snow days—approved topsy-turvy misrule in a fleeting interlude between usual routines. I suspect this accounts for much of the fascination and excitement that goes with snow in a country where by and large there is none. Unless we are travelling, or obliged to work whatever the conditions, most of us thrill to the fact that just sometimes our lives are ‘gloriously disrupted’, as a friend recently put it.

Fields beyond Cranbrook.

The delights and obstacles of niveous mayhem remind us that the natural world can and does call the shots, even if most of our lives are spent smugly believing otherwise. The remarkable trick of snow, in fact, is even more absolute. It performs a dissolution, smothering time and place so that the world appears ageless, our traces erased. In the fields beyond our town where the expanse of snow goes out to sky, broken only by blackbird tree-lines, the whiteness is everything and nothing.