Birdsong

 The rigs run down to the cliff edge

Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending was recently voted the most popular piece of classical music in the country.    It was chosen as one of the pieces played at the commemoration of the 9/11 tragedy so its appeal extends far beyond our shores.

Vaughan Williams himself did not, apparently, regard it as one of his greatest works.

Its popularity maybe partly due to the image of this tiny bird rising into the blue, wings beating frantically while it pours out its song.  The human equivalent might be to sprint a hundred metres in ten seconds while singing “Che gelida manina" at full register.

The skylarks were in good voice as I skirted the long rigs that run down to the tops of the cliffs along our local coastline but they were in competition with another songster perched inconspicuously atop a stunted hawthorn.   A song that gives rise to that old Scots expression of joy – “singing like lintie” – it was a linnet.  Once so numerous, that our Victorian forefathers, perpetrators of so much wildlife crime, kept them as cage-birds, they are now on the “Red” list of endangered breeds.

 Coastline walk

Birdsong has and probably will always be an inspiration for composers.  The cuckoo features famously in Beethoven, Britten, Mahler and Mozart. The nightingale makes several appearances and there have been parts for robins, wagtails and even siskins.  Vivaldi had his “Goldfinch ” concerto but I can’t find a reference to the linnet.  There must be one somewhere.

Probably the most famous bird in music is the little bird, Peter’s friend in Peter and the Wolf  though I don’t think Prokofiev said what sort of bird it was.  I think it sounds like a wren but I am definitely no musician.

A  recent trip to the Hebrides was enlivened by the daily calling of the gowk whose name, to Anglophones, embodies its call…the cuckoo, and by that sound, now so rare on the mainland, that of the corn crake.

The corn crake’s onomatopoeic Latin name, crex crex, like a thumbnail running down a comb, exactly describes the call that seems to come from about six different birds or from six different locations in the reeds.  No wonder it has a reputation as a ventriloquist.

Watching people going about, walking, jogging, cycling, even waiting at bus stops, with their ears plugged into their i-pods, I fear that a generation will never know the song of a blackbird or the “wise thrush; he sings each song twice over” let alone the linnet or the skylark.

Trees

A visit to Perthshire to the big hills and big trees made a pleasant break from the sodden byways of the Scottish Borders.

The Falls

The Birks

The Birks of Aberfeldy, immortalised in verse by Burns, provided a pleasant evening stroll.  The air was charged with negative ions from the cascading Falls of Moness, its purity vouched for by the lichens clinging to every ancient tree.   Wood anemones and red squirrels added to the enjoyment.

Being among such splendid trees, there had to be a visit to the Fortingall yew, reputed to be up to five thousand years old.   For years it suffered depredation by souvenir hunters and local children and is now protected in a walled enclosure.  There is a local legend that Pontius Pilate was born here as the offspring of a Roman ambassador and a Pictish woman but it seems a highly unlikely tale.

The Yew

 If its age is a great as recorded, the yew has stood from a time before the Neolithic settlers raised the stone circles that still abound in the surrounding fields.  It was once circled by wolf and bear.  Wild boar would have rooted about in its shade.

It’s a thought.   A living organism that goes on and on, regardless of human existence, oblivious to us except when we come and cut chunks from it or set fire to it as has happened to the yew.   Five thousand years,  hmmm!

I have this little yew in a pot.  I found it growing under one of the apple trees.  It was probably seeded by a thrush having dined on the berries of a mature specimen that grows by the nearby burn.  Thrushes seem to be only birds that eat yew berries - and laburnum seeds - without any harm coming to them.  

  Now, if I can just grow it up a bit, then find a safe spot to plant it out …….and in  7012…..will there be any one here to see it?

On the subject of trees, I’ve been keeping an eye on the oak and the ash coming into leaf.

Oak before the ash, in for a splash

Ash before the oak, in for a soak

At the moment they seem to be neck and neck but I have a feeling the ash is going to draw away in the leafy stakes and we are in for a wet summer.    Experts say it is temperature that controls the sequence with cooler weather favouring the ash and doesn’t predict rainfall.  I hope they are right