We All Love Bird Song but it’s just Birds Screaming for Sex

Wild Notes #7 Dawn Chorus at Wild Haweswater

I love this time of year when spring segues into summer: the verges fizz with cow parsley before turning to the candy pink and yellow of red campion and creeping buttercup. At Wild Pinebeck, our mini rewilding project, Willow Field is filled with swathes of ox-eye daisies, and in the main meadow, sun flows through the miniature red stained glass of sheep sorrel seeds.

Photo by Yomex Owo on Unsplash

May is traditionally the time to listen to the dawn chorus and, indeed, International Dawn Chorus Day is globally celebrated on the first Sunday in May. But birds sing throughout the spring and summer, it’s just that it may be harder to hear them because of the density of vegetation and because, as the days grow ever lighter, we have to get up even earlier to hear them.

The phrase ‘the early bird catches the worm’ is not just a meaningless phrase designed to shame teenagers. Worm-eating birds like robins and blackbirds of often rise and sing before it’s light or as soon as the dawn breaks. Once they’ve run through their song sheet, they can start foraging. Insectivorous birds, on the other hand, can have a little lie-in because they need the light to fly after their prey.

Why do birds sing?

In spring it’s usually the males who sing as they want to attract females, proving, through their musical prowess, what a fine set of genes they have and that therefore the females would love to mate with them and have their babies, who will share fifty percent of their glorious songstrel genes too.

Annabel Rushton, the RSPB’s Visitor Experience Manager at Wild Haweswater tells me, ‘We all enjoy bird song, but it’s just birds screaming for sex.’

Female birds sing too. Their song has largely been ignored, perhaps because the majority of of papers published about bird song have been written by men? Of the 1,000 species examined, 64% have females that sing, some all year round, some during specific times in the breeding season and often to defend their territory.

Why is it so early?

There’s less noise competition and fewer predators first thing in the morning. I once had a boyfriend who lived in a top floor apartment in the city centre and when I stayed over, I couldn’t sleep for the racket the birds were making; in cities birds often sing even earlier and fly higher so that they can be heard above the sound of construction work and traffic.

Wild Haweswater © Patrick Neaves

Naddle Farm Dawn Chorus

This year I went on several dawn chorus sojourns, starting with Wild Haweswater in Cumbria, where we met at the RSPB’s offices at Naddle Farm. The day was still dark enough for bats to flit around our faces as we stood in the yard and listened to blackbirds, blue tits, great tits and the laughing ‘yaffle’ of a greater spotted woodpecker.

I find it hard to pick out the different bird species from the general mellifluous melée. The blackbird stood out in this chorus since it’s perfectly adapted to woodlands - it broadcasts its song from tree tops and the sound travels far; it’s also far more melodic than the tits.

Annabel says that a great tit sounds like a bicycle pump: squeaky and wheezy. Blue tits are not particularly melodic either - two or three notes with a lower pitched trill.

But how do I tell the difference between a blackbird and a robin, especially as their songs are similar and they sing at the same time of day?

My neighbour and fellow rewilder, Charlie Petch, who, with his partner and fellow ecologist, Rachel Petch, are based at A Patch Wilder, says that a blackbird’s song sounds similar to a robin’s, expect that it’s fruiter and fuller.

That makes it sound like a fine Merlot, but back home, I think I can tell the difference between blackbirds and the thinner warbles and whistles of the robin who lives behind the back of the house.

‘We see pied flycatchers flit like minuscule black-and-white dreams from tree to tree.’

Hedgerow Dawn Chorus

We walk down the farm track, past dense bushy hedgerows and now hear redstart, wrens, willow warblers and chiffchaffs. Wrens, Charlie tells me on his dawn chorus walk at A Patch Wilder, can sing 100 notes in a few seconds ending in a little trill at a volume that is extraordinary for their diminutive size.

Chiffhcaffs, willow and wood warblers look almost identical, but willow warblers sing simple but beautiful songs whereas wood warblers’produce a series of rather shrill short notes.

The naturalist Gilbert White realised that a bird called the ‘willow wren’ was actually three separate species - chiffchaffs, willow and wood warblers - based on listening to their songs. He published his findings in 1789 in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, describing the summer song of the wood warbler as ‘sibilous shivering’.

Woodland

We climb into a temperate rainforest composed of semi-ancient oaks - a mere 300 years-old - and great stands of bird cherry; the chill early morning air is drenched in the sweet smell of their nectar. We hear tree creeper and nuthatch, before emerging into more open fields with veteran trees spaced quite far apart and here we have the joy of seeing pied flycatchers flit like minuscule black-and-white dreams from tree to tree.

‘Their song is pathetic,’ comments RSPB warden Spike Webb.

Bird cherry at Wild Haweswater © Sanjida O’Connell

Bird song is good for you

Bird song - even if it is about sex and space to the birds - is good for our mental  health, helping alleviate depression, paranoia and anxiety according to two studies published in 2022. Charlie says that this may because as a species we evolved in semi-open woodland and have an unconscious bias towards bird song. After all, when all is well with the world, birds sing, but when a predator is near, they fall silent. It’s perhaps why we like some background noise, he speculates, the hum to the TV or the radio on low in the background when we’re home.

Certainly waking up to bird song every summer morning feels restorative and soothing - even if I’d like to go back to bed for a few more hours.

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