Park SOUNDS
Urban parks can be rewarding for birding when you haven’t much time. Thirty-minute birder Amanda Tuke discovers that it takes a bit of confidence and it pays to practise your song and call recognition skills before you go
High-pitched shrieks from a school playground on the park’s edge compete with the raucous laughter from men by a fishing bivvy. Planes growl westwards to Heathrow over a building site, where cranes clank and grind. The pulsating crescendo of a siren cuts through the traffic rumble from the Old Kent Road, and I wonder how on earth am I going to distinguish bird sounds in this racket.
Welcome to Burgess Park. Surrounded by dense housing, major roads and new development, it’s an urban greenspace with attitude. Rather like a patchwork quilt, the park was pieced together from scraps
– demolition sites, a filled-in canal and gardens – and its
140 acres now include woodland strips, areas of scrub and reedbed slivers at the edge of a pond. Local birder
Dave Clark has told me that this is now one of the best places to birdwatch in south London.
Following Dave’s recommendation, I first squeezed in a trip here a couple of weeks ago, before my working day began.
Perhaps urban parks aren’t the obvious destinations for birdwatching, but what they might lack in wildness and tranquillity, they can make up for in access and inclusivity. This one is easy for me to bus to, and is perfect for half an hour of birding on the way into town. It’s busy, well-designed and feels safe, which is essential for women like me who want to enjoy urban birding on their own. “What’s she doing?” a pre-schooler asked loudly that first morning, pointing in my
direction. Inner-city kids probably see few, if any, birdwatchers. Feeding ducks in the park when they’re little may be the only time in their lives when kids are interested in birds. And then that’s probably it. If birding was as visible in city parks as say, fishing, perhaps a few more young people would carry on being interested. So, I like to think I’m doing my bit.
Identifying birdsong
Standing next to a busy path while peering up into the trees, took some confidence in such a public place. Dog-walkers seemed curious rather than hostile, but I still felt a bit self-conscious. A few minutes later, in a woodland clearing, a young woman stopped to chat because she’d noticed my binoculars. “I’m so impressed with the great job they’ve done rewilding the park!” she said happily, and she told me she was now planning to bring her binoculars when she came next time.
Other than a Chiffchaff, Swifts and Great Crested Grebes, I didn’t see much that first time. Trees in leaf are a challenge for a birder-in-learning. Relying on sight alone, beginner birders could be forgiven for thinking that there wasn’t much to find here, other than waterbirds and crows. With limited ability to distinguish bird sounds, I realised I wasn’t much better off than the walkers and runners passing by with noise-cancelling headphones.
Back home, I read the bird list which Dave Clark had sent over for the park. As well as the usual garden visitors, there were records he and other regulars had made this year of nine different warblers, plus Redstart, Wheatear and Linnet.
It was quite possible I’d walked straight past a hidden Whitethroat or Linnet singing, without realising what it was. It was time to improve my birdlistening skills to get more out of my quick park visits. And I was quietly hopeful that, as an amateur musician who learns music by ear, I might even be starting off with an advantage.
I was very quickly put right on that! It was easy enough to find online recordings of bird sounds to listen to, but despite my years of learning tunes, I found it difficult to hang on to the aural memory of a birdsong from one day to the next. The annoying number of variations the birds came up with really didn’t help either.
And, to cap it all, I read some 2019 research which found that urban Song Thrushes, for example, sang more complicated, more ‘twittery’ and less whistly songs than their country cousins.
Back for a second visit to Burgess Park, I was tiptoeing round a shrubby willow. Every so often I caught glimpses of a warbler-sized bird between the leaves, but never enough of the jigsaw pieces to distinguish features. It was all very well looking for eye-stripes, but you need to actually see an eye to do that. Then, just before I was ready to give up, a song erupted. Pointing my voice recorder at the tree, I added it to the other song snippets I’d already captured that morning. I didn’t know who these singers were, but I knew a woman who would.
Ruth Miller, Bird Watching magazine regular, had kindly agreed to help me with the song identifications. I shared with her my suspicion that I’d made repeated recordings of Blackcaps... and, I was almost right. Three of the five recordings were indeed of Blackcaps, and the other two were Goldfinches, with Wrens bombing the soundtracks at regular intervals. Ruth very tactfully asked whether I’d noticed that birds often stop singing the moment you try to record them. That was kind of her, but I suspected the real issue was that I was only noticing the loudest, most distinctive songs. Either that, or I was just being stalked by Blackcaps.
Small steps
I was going to need some in-person help with subtle bird sounds. On a blustery morning, I met up with conductor, birder and author Lev Parikian in Southwark’s Dulwich Park. As Lev is a professional musician, I was hopeful that he’d share his bird-listening secrets. He was doubtful that my ‘learning music by ear’ experience would help me much though. “One of the challenges of bird songs is, unlike music, they are confined to a fairly narrow range of the notes humans can hear”, he said, “and to many people they all just sound high-pitched”. Nice, Lev.
Seriously, though, having a personal bird-listening guide was an absolute treat. With Lev’s help, and despite the noisy wind, I could tune into the descending rasp of a Greenfinch. “And that call’s a Goldcrest”, Lev said, although I had to
have it pointed out to me several times before I could home in on it. “While the song patterns can vary, hopefully you’ll start recognising the ‘voice’ of a bird, like you’d know the voice of a friend, whatever they’re talking about,” he told me. He agreed that adding one new bird sound at a time was the right thing to do.
Lev’s enthusiasm was infectious, and at home listening to recordings of Reed and Sedge Warblers, I realised I was beginning to notice the tone, and what musicians call ‘timbre’ or quality of the sounds, as much as the song structure. It was time to go back to Burgess Park for practice.
As the pulsating siren finally fades into the distance, I’m finally able to tune in for some serious bird-listening. I shut my eyes for a moment and let the inner-city sounds recede. First up is a familiar chatty voice of an old friend. “Definitely a Blackcap”, I mutter to myself, and I’m rewarded when he duly appears on a patch of brambles. The next sound I recognise is the monotone staccato from the intro of a Greenfinch’s performance.
I cup my hands behind my ears and that helps me track the singer to the top of a lime tree. I spend a while just enjoying the show before making for the pond.
A repetitive rasp starts up from the slim patch of reeds directly in front of me. “Reed Warbler!” and, for the very first time, I’m pretty confident that I haven’t confused it with a Sedge Warbler. It’s a nice touch when this feisty park singer, my new bestie, perches obligingly on a reed only a couple of metres from me. Small steps.