Leading nature writer, broadcaster and wildlife television producer Stephen Moss tells Nick Major about his new book and lifetime love of bird song.
Every year Stephen Moss waits to hear the first song thrush of spring. Its “comforting, repetitive song...sounds like the bird is talking to you”, he says. The sound of the belly-freckled snail-basher, which usually appears “on a fine day in January”, has particular resonance for Moss. His earliest memory of hearing birds is of song thrushes and blackbirds singing on the roofs of the houses as he walked home from school through London suburbs in the mid-1960s. He was out walking with his primary school at the age of eight or nine when he saw his first great crested grebe at the local gravel pits. Later, a friendship struck up at secondary school with fellow birdwatcher Daniel Osorio ensured his interest in birds did not fall by the wayside.
Moss went on to become the original producer of the Bafta award-winning programme Springwatch and has worked with David Attenborough, Bill Oddie and Simon King. He has written more than twenty books on birds and wildlife, including Birds Britannia and Wild Hares and Hummingbirds: The Natural History of an English Village.
This year he was a key speaker at the RSPB’s Scottish Birdfair, where he introduced his new book, Tweet of the Day. Co-authored with Brett Westwood, the book was commissioned by the BBC after the resounding success of the popular radio programme of the same name. Moss says the authors’ aim was to capture the essence of almost 250 British birds in brief but very intense accounts, spurred on by their mutual love of “the way birds have a meaning beyond their purely biological existence, and how they affect us in our daily lives”.
The interpretation of birdsong comes with historical baggage. Moss maintains that during the 1970s, “it was seen as anthropomorphic to feel any kind of emotional attachment to nature - something that was taken for granted before the Second World War with writers like W.H.Hudson and Henry Williamson (and indeed Gilbert White) but fell out of fashion when scientists held sway. Sometime around the millennium this began to change, and today we are able to engage emotionally and spiritually with nature as well as scientifically. Birdsong is a great example of something we can appreciate on many levels, from the biological to the emotional.”
Apart from the simple pleasures it gives to the ear, birdsong is often a gateway for identification. “Once you know what a bird is you can begin to learn more about its behaviour, its movements and migrations, and its cultural importance,” Moss says. The introduction to Tweet of the Day identifies the connection between birdsong and art. Although Moss thinks the music of birds more akin to free-form jazz than poetry, he says “many great poets have been inspired by birdsong, most notably John Clare”, while the great Scottish zen-calvinist poet Norman MacCaig “captures the wonder of birds with amazing brevity and beauty”. Tweet of the Day quotes an extract from his poem Stonechat on Cul Beg, where the call of this “trim and dandy bird” is a quick hard “flint-on-flint ticking”. Moss’ love of the thrush calls to mind Philip Larkin’s poem Coming, with its clear image of the bird’s “fresh-peeled voice/ astonishing the brickwork”.
For many people, linking a disembodied song with its avian singer is a daunting task. In his talk at the Scottish Birdfair, Moss likened interpretation to learning a language. As with any learning process this means admitting, and not fearing, interpretative mistakes. For children in particular it is made all the more difficult as they are ensconced in what he describes as an “education system that hates failure”.
It is comforting to know that even for an expert like Moss, the calls of all common birds such as chaffinch and great tit can be confusing. There are more than 5,000 songbird species around the world, making comprehensive knowledge next to impossible. Nevertheless, for any budding interpreter, Moss has plenty of tips. The clue to many bird songs is in the name, and mnemonics can be useful memory aid. Birds’ names frequently derive from their song; the chiffchaff or the kittiwake are among the more obvious examples. “It’s important to listen carefully to each species and work out what is memorable about their song...the song thrush is repetitive, the great tit syncopated, the willow warbler goes down the scale,” Moss says. He recommends Bill Oddie's “rhythm, pitch and tone” as a good place to start.
For Moss, bird song arrests the mind. It is choral harmony of meaning. His passion and knowledge is a reminder that bird song is not merely a biological survival instinct. The call of the cuckoo, or the song of the thrush reminding us year on year that, in the words of Larkin, “it will be spring soon, it will be spring soon”.
Tweet of the Day (Saltyard Books, 2014) is out now in hardback.