On song How we learnt to listen

With less background noise, we have become more attuned to the sounds of nature, says Mike Unwin

“With infection rates rising rapidly,” intoned the man from the BBC, “South Africa braces itself for…” But I’d already tuned out from the latest dispiriting Covid-19 bulletin, my attention grabbed by the raucous background cries of a familiar bird. “Haa, haaa, haaa!” A hadeda ibis: I’d know it anywhere. Instantly, I was transported from urban English kitchen to African waterhole, a line of elephants trundling down to drink.

This wasn’t the only occasion last year that a chance bird overheard on TV or radio teleported me elsewhere. In a documentary on Indian railways, the bubbling of a koel conjured up steaming monsoon rains. In an American backwoods thriller, the tremolo of a loon evoked mirror-still lake reflections and the scent of pines.

There is nothing quite like birdsong to encapsulate the essence of location A and deliver it intact (“ta-da!”) to location B. This auditory brain-burst is what Wordsworth might have called “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. In Covid times, it has felt more like emotion recollected in exasperation: a bird’s voice carrying us to a place we love, but reminding us that we can’t go there.

Stuck at home, many of us have been discovering birdsong afresh. With lockdown putting our noisy world on mute, natural sounds have become more audible. And, with time on our hands, we’ve actually started to listen – as many will be doing this weekend as they take part in the Big Garden Birdwatch. Last summer, several friends reported an “amazing new bird” serenading them from their garden. In fact, it was seldom anything new: blackbird, robin or song thrush were the usual suspects, despite occasional claims of nightingale. But, to newly opened ears, the singer had advanced from background to foreground; from elevator muzak to gala aria. At last, our feathered maestros were receiving their due applause.

Pondering the evocative power of birdsong and our newly heightened awareness of it, I reflected on how the ears of the wildlife traveller were often sorely neglected. Most experiences are predicated on visuals: what we can see and, especially, photograph. Yet sound can reveal so much about nature without us laying eyes on anything. And somehow, perhaps because it never lets up, even when you close your eyes, it permeates deeper into your psyche.

Last January, shortly before the first lockdown, I found myself in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley listening for a lion. It was a quiet night, and as I focused my ears, other voices broke the silence: the whoop of a hyena; the metronomic ping of a fruit bat; the quavering whistle of a nightjar. And the more I listened, the more I realised there was no silence: that the background soundscape was a piping orchestra of painted reed frogs, and behind that – further back still – was a ceaseless thrum of crickets and cicadas. Once I’d tuned in, my quiet night had become a cacophony. And yet I couldn’t see a thing.

As the world opens up again in 2021, perhaps we should heed the lessons of lockdown: keep our ears open and make time just to listen. At the very least, we might bank sound-memories to get us through the next pandemic.

Sound can reveal so much about nature without your needing to lay eyes on anything

The Big Garden Birdwatch ends tomorrow (rspb.org.uk/birdwatch)

Stop, look and above all listen to the sounds that encapsulate the essence of a place