by Lev Parikian
Year total: 27
Note
* My throw made up in enthusiasm for what it lacked in accuracy.
MARCH 2016
It’s the strangest thing I’ve seen on a football pitch. Play begins in the usual way, both sides easing themselves into the game without attacking intent. After a few passes, the ball comes to a midfielder, who – unprovoked and under no pressure – blasts it deliberately out of play. The ball soars over our heads into the trees lining the cycle path. There’s disbelief among the players, but the most offended party is a tall, angular bird, whose nest, perched on top of a telegraph pole, the ball has narrowly missed. It flies up in a flurry, its wingbeats deep and powerful, circles for a few seconds and returns, quickly settling into a dignified pose, like an elderly classics professor.
I’m amused by the footballer’s overenthusiastic amateurism, but transfixed by the bird. It’s glorious, not dissimilar in shape and size to the grey heron which landed on our shed roof a couple of weeks earlier, causing me to splutter toothpaste over the floor. Tall and upright, it tucks its long carrot bill into its chest, giving it a bashful appearance. But what it does next is anything but introverted. Leaning forward, it bangs the upper and lower parts of its bill together in quick staccato bursts. It takes me a few seconds to connect the loud clattering sound with the bird in front of me. It sounds more like a piece of machinery than a sound of nature – an industrial-sized sewing machine or those deafening pavement-pounding whacker plates. I watch, engrossed, until I feel Tessa and Oliver’s impatience wafting across the path towards me. Reluctantly I tear my eyes from the bird. It’s a white stork, my first ever. A lifer, as birders have it. As we trundle onwards, I take a backward glance, keeping it in view for as long as I can.
Marvellous bird, the stork. The only thing is, it doesn’t count. We are in Germany, so this bird has no place on my list. To avoid miring myself in murky political waters, I should stress that this distinction is purely geographical. I’ve sworn to maintain a British list, so a British list it must be. Birds seen on foreign soil, however beguiling, cannot be part of this challenge. I’ll remember the stork, and have already added it to the ‘Cycling’ and ‘Rainy Tuesday in Germany’ lists, but as a contribution to the grand project it’s worthless.
The merits of a cycling holiday up the Rhine in late March are many. The terrain is flat, a boon for cyclists whose thighs seize up on the smallest incline; there’s interesting scenery; and the mild discomfort caused by the cold and rain is offset by the smugness induced by strenuous exercise and the heartiness of the meals we allow ourselves each evening.
But from the project’s point of view, the holiday disrupts a month of solid progress, new knowledge and burgeoning obsession. A month that starts with me standing in the middle of the road, staring at a bush.
It’s an unremarkable road, likewise the bush. Suburban south London at its blandest.
A first-floor window opens. A lady, courteous but puzzled, asks if I need help. She’s in her sixties, well-spoken, enquiring. I can feel her worry from fifteen paces. Normal people don’t stand in the middle of the road staring at bushes.
I have options. I could scuttle away with a muttered apology, but that might disturb her even more. Or I could explain the circumstances, my journey back into birdwatching, the significance of this bird.
Instead I steer the middle path.
‘Oh... thank you. I’m just... looking for a bird.’
She makes a little exclamation of understanding and closes the window in an exaggeratedly unobtrusive way. But I’m grateful to her for not calling the police, and revert to staring at the bush.
In keeping with its surroundings, the bird is the embodiment of anonymity. But it represents a breakthrough, a moment of triumph. A minute ago I was a man walking down a road. Then I heard an agglomeration of scrabbling birdsong, the word ‘dunnock’ popped into my head, and now I’m nothing less than a mighty birdsong god.
I didn’t even have to think. The connection between song and name was instinctive. My hard work is paying off. The dunnock’s song has filtered into my synapses and is making a little home there. It won’t be the first I’ve seen – there’s one in the garden, the first sign of its presence often a jelly-like trembling in the lavender – but it is the first I’ve identified from song alone. Now I just need it to show its face so I can confirm its identity.
Bang on cue a small brown bird appears, perched on the perimeter of the bush. I drink in the distinctive streakings on its back, the grey around its head, the slender, pointed bill. I nod and smile, as if granting it permission to leave, and off it flies to destination unknown. I watch as it bounces away. There have been many pleasing moments in my return to the avian world, but this is the most satisfying. There’s an absurd sense of achievement about it, like the moment in learning a piece of music when things slot into place after weeks of struggle, or when you finally work out what that button on the dishwasher does. This is the nature of all learning: you think you’re treading water, but your brain is sorting things out in the background without telling you.
In the wake of the Great Robin Identification Debacle, I’ve prioritised the learning of birdsong, an area of birding I mostly ignored in my youth. I remember a desultory attempt to record a blackbird using a portable cassette recorder, a cheap microphone, and a dustbin lid, but otherwise the sounds birds produced went unexplored. I was aware of the obvious ones – the grawings of crows, squawkings of gulls, the cuckooing of our annual cuckoo – but the mysterious world of songbirds passed me by.
Buying the British Bird Sounds CDs was one thing. Now it’s time to listen to them, from avocet to yellowhammer. It’s a bewildering array of scrawks, grunts and chirrups, and I’ve honed my playlist to the birds I’m expecting to encounter locally. It’s a good time to be doing it. The explosion of spring is imminent, and male birds are clearing their syrinxes in preparation for the mating season. The air is already beginning to fill with confusing noises, and I’d like to be ahead of the game by the time they hit mid-season form. I’ve read that a lot of birding is done with the ears. If you can recognise a bird’s song, there’s no need to dive into the undergrowth in search of it. You can merely cock an ear, mutter, ‘Ah yes, icterine warbler,’ and continue with your day.
You would have thought a conductor, trained to perceive faulty intonation, poor tone, wrong notes in the back desk of the violas and myriad other discrepancies in a complex web of orchestral sound, would be able to learn the songs of a few common birds.
You would have thought.
I’ve listened to recordings of the dunnock. I’ve also listened to blackbirds, robins, great tits, blue tits, coal tits, wrens, goldfinches, chaffinches, bullfinches, greenfinches, blackcaps, willow warblers, garden warblers, whitethroats, goldcrests, starlings, mistle thrushes, song thrushes and nuthatches, and I’m buggered if I can remember which is which.
My inability to learn birdsong is partly down to my conviction that I can do it all at once, a disastrous policy whose futility I explored as a panicked teenager, wondering whether if I stayed up all night I could memorise all the German words starting with M.
But it’s also down to the very nature of birdsong. For every cuckoo, with its ‘specially for foreigners’ two-note song, there’s a capercaillie, which sounds like a mixture of a ball going down a plughole and someone sanding a grasshopper.
With the songbirds I might encounter locally, there are several confounding factors. Speed of song is one, predictability of trajectory another. If a dunnock were to sing ‘Danny Boy’ or the main theme from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, I’d be fine. But it doesn’t. The dunnock’s song is a scrabbly, indeterminate bunch of nearly-notes which lasts a couple of seconds and then stops. After a short pause it starts again, similar but not identical.
It’s not the only bird whose song can be described as scrabbly and indeterminate, and my apprentice ears aren’t able to sort them all out.
Take th
e wren, the very-nearly-smallest British bird, which hammers out its explosive song at twelve notes a second. If it were playing a pattern with predictable contours, like a G major scale, this would be less problematic, but to my ears the wren’s song skitters around randomly, the only constant a machine-gun trill near the end – except when the cheeky devil chooses to omit it. As I get to grips with it, I begin to recognise an easy distinguishing feature: the volume of its song is out of all proportion to the bird’s size. Tiny bird, the wren, weighing no more than a pound coin, but when it sings the air around is electrified.
Compare this with Britain’s actual smallest bird, the goldcrest. Its thin, piping song is recognisable partly because of its stratospheric pitch – it clocks in at 7 kHz, 2.5 kHz higher than the highest note of the piccolo.* It also restricts itself, more or less, to three notes, with a squiggly flourish to round it off. The most heavily thumbed page in my copy of The Reader’s Digest Book of Birds was the goldcrest’s. I loved it hard. Perhaps it was because (and here I encourage you, in sympathy with Britain’s smallest bird and 1970s Oxfordshire’s smallest child, to play the world’s smallest violin) I was what my mother called a ‘late developer’. While my contemporaries rocketed skywards, I needed a ladder just to sit on a chair. At one point I thought I was shrinking. I was so desperate to grow that I indulged in what might generously be called ‘wishful thinking’, but more accurately ‘measurement fraud’. The pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe indicated a miraculous spurt of three inches in one twenty-four-hour period in 1975, the result of judicious standing on tiptoes and dirty work at the pencil. I yearned to grow, but remained minuscule until well into my teens, by which time I had other problems.
So it was solidarity with a fellow titch, as well as the bird’s undeniable charms, that kick-started my unrequited love affair with the goldcrest.
Yes, unrequited, for of all the common birds I might have expected to see in the normal course of events, this one eluded me.
And then, one bright spring day in 1977, there it was. My goldcrest. Not, as I’d been led to expect, flitting around in the upper tiers of a conifer, but perched on an apple tree, head cocked and staring directly at me with an appealing look. Its crown was alive with the yellowy-orange stripe that gives it its name, and its tiny body quivered with energy. This adorable bundle of fluff, the same weight as a 20p piece* but much cuddlier, constituted an overwhelming onslaught of cuteness. It felt like ‘my’ bird. The bond between us was a momentary thread of eye contact, but no less strong for that. To me, at any rate. History doesn’t record the goldcrest’s feelings. And now, thirty-nine years on, as I wrap my ears around the squeaky ‘tsee-ba-da-tsee-ba-da-tsee-ba-da-scabba-diddle-oo’ on the recording, I make a special effort to add it to my repertoire of recognised songs. I’m buoyed by my success with the dunnock, and have started listening with renewed application, determined to nail more of them down.
The difficulties, I realise, aren’t just to do with speed and unpredictability. We find it difficult to differentiate and transliterate the specific tone and timbre of much birdsong because we’re not equipped to do so. There are birdsongs you can slow down and notate in conventional musical language, but how do you transcribe the screechy part of a blue tit’s call? And how does it make it anyway?
Step forward the syrinx, avian equivalent of our larynx. Birds’ control of this flexible voice box, the tubes that run through it, the lips that can either partially or completely close either of those tubes, and the windpipe through which the sound travels after leaving the syrinx, make them capable of astonishing vocal control. And because there are two tubes and two pairs of lips within the syrinx, those vocalisations make up a range of sounds not available to any other animal.
My research into the sound world of birds leads me to sonograms. These graphic representations of birdsong (frequency on the y axis, time on the x) mean we can examine differences our ears might struggle to recognise. Unfortunately I’m as easily befuddled by sonograms as by birdsong, so after a contented but confused few hours exploring their fuzzy and mysterious world, I admit this might be a project for future years.
I realise the truth, obvious to anyone who knows anything about anything: expertise takes time, practice and patience. What made me think bird identification would be different?
I think of my conducting teacher, the incomparable Ilya Alexandrovich Musin. He was ninety-two and still going strong when I went to St Petersburg to glean what I could from him. An interviewer once asked how he knew so much about conducting. His reply was simple: ‘I’ve thought about little else for seventy years.’
I can’t imagine devoting seventy years to the song of the dunnock. And perhaps there’s my problem. It’s why the Great Lego City never got past the planning stage.
I think too of my father, dedicated to the art of playing the violin from the age of five, when his uncle – leading light for a generation of Armenian musicians in Cyprus – gave him his first lessons. The lifelong pursuit of musical excellence brought him to England as a teenager, and, apart from the intervention of the war, he stayed here for the rest of his life. As a very young child I sat cross-legged on his music-room floor listening to him practise. In my memory these sessions lasted for hours, but more likely I got bored after ten minutes and pootled off to play with my toy cars. But the image remains. The worn red rug on a wooden floor, music stand in the middle of the room, grand piano filling the bay window, which looked out onto the garden. It was a room of warm wood, light and space, an old partners’ desk and a glass-fronted cabinet containing rare Armenian books and miniature scores adding to the studious atmosphere. And at the centre of it all my father, seemingly oblivious to my presence, to everything but the music.
His stature in my eyes as a musician of exemplary rigour and taste was established early on. Everyone told me, and I heard it for myself. But growing up with the sound of excellent violin playing in my ears was a mixed blessing. It instilled an understanding of the single-mindedness required to excel at a discipline, but also set a benchmark I could never hope to reach. So in my mind, whatever I did, I was always failing. It wasn’t his fault. He was merely doing what he did, and there never was a less pushy parent. But when you grow up in the foothills of Everest, there’s a danger you never learn to appreciate the myriad qualities of the Cotswolds.
My own violinistic career was brief and disastrous, the impossibility of the task obvious to me even at six. The piano seemed a more realistic undertaking. The notes were already there, the only challenge being to press the keys in the right order, like a typist. That there was much more to it than that gradually dawned on me as I progressed through the grades, and I hit the wall in my early teens, my indolence by then so overwhelming I could barely hold myself upright at the keyboard.
This wasn’t a problem when I was sitting behind drums. The appeal of percussion instruments, when I had my first lessons at thirteen, was instant, and I found whether it was the timpani in the orchestra or the drum kit in a jazz band, the rhythmic hitting of pleasingly resonant instruments energised me. And boy, did I need energising. That orchestral life as a percussionist consisted of so little actual playing seemed a bonus, this leaving plenty of time for mucking around at the back. But even then the seeds of my future career were being sown. You can learn a lot about conducting from the back of an orchestra, even if subconsciously, and I found the long rests were enlivened if I knew the context of my next biff. Knowing the cymbal crash or snare drum roll came at the end of the oboe solo or just after the trombone chord soon became second nature, and so an interest in the whole score, rather than just my own part, was born.
As my school career progressed, it became clear that the only things I was prepared to devote time to were percussion, cricket and fecklessness. My piano-playing deteriorated to such an extent that I was reduced to repeating the first twenty bars of the same Beethoven sonata, this being all I could manage. I decided to give it up. I steeled myself to tell my parents. The announce
ment came in an incoherent welter of tears. My mother, phlegmatic and nobody’s fool, received the unsurprising news in silence, then allowed herself one comment:
‘Well, it’s a shame, because I think you’re going to be a conductor, and it might come in handy.’
It’s the kind of moment that sticks in the memory. I was fifteen and showing no signs of interest in any kind of career, which is only right and natural at that age. Was she being amazingly prescient? Or was it blindingly obvious that somewhere in the disaster area of my early teenage years, with all my uncertainty, foot-shuffling, ‘dunno-sir-sorry-sir’ mumbling and shyness, there lurked a monstrous egomaniac waiting to be unleashed? Or did I take her words, lodge them in the depths of my brain, and run with them, tentatively at first, but with gathering speed and confidence as I realised, many years down the line, that I wanted to be a conductor?
I didn’t realise that my flusterment was misguided. I was in a pother because I thought my parents wanted me to play the piano. I was wrong. All they wanted was for me to be happy. The tricks the mind plays.
This lack of dedication to the piano came back to haunt me, and in my weaker moments haunts me still. The nagging voice of paranoia reminding you of your own failings can be difficult to silence, no matter how many other skills you amass to counteract them. So for all that I’m comfortable standing in front of an orchestra, for all that I’ve developed the myriad skills required for the job, for all that I’ve found a niche in a notoriously difficult field, there will always be a small part of me insisting it’s not enough.
For two weeks I give bird identification the devotion I should have given my piano practice all those years ago. I immerse myself in bird guides, absorbing indigestible volumes of information, hoping some of it will stick. I memorise the names of all the warblers likely to appear in Britain in spring, much as I memorised the batting averages of all the Kent batsmen in 1976. Gulls and waders receive the same treatment. I note aberrations of plumage, leg colour and bill size, distinguishing features which will help me identify birds in the field. This barrage of information bounces around in my head like socks in a tumble dryer.