A dunnock's song compared to that of the robin and the wren

Dunnock in a tree with a sky much like today's

In the last few days there have been the first tentative intimations of Spring. The sun is proudly out and you can feel its heat a bit more tangibly. Yesterday on my way to work I heard a greenfinch (I thought I had written a post about the greenfinch's song, but I haven't. I meant to) and today I went for a walk to the library and on the way down, I saw and heard a dunnock in a tree in someone's front garden, in the street opposite the churchyard. 

I stood and listened to it sing for as long as I could. I had forgotten about the dunnock. They're quite friendly and don't mind being seen.

They look like sparrows but with less brown and black and white, and more grey, maybe slightly bigger too. In fact the dunnock is sometimes called a hedge sparrow, but though it may look similar to a sparrow, it has a much better voice. Where the house sparrows just chirp away monosyllabically and monotone, the dunnock has a lyrical twittery song. It's fast and high and complicated, offered in little snatches that are often responded to by another dunnock in another tree.

The dunnock's song sounds very stereotypically birdsong-like, but it's distinctive; its quick twittered phrases sound almost regular, like a Mozart allegro, whereas the robin, for instance, is jazzy, syncopated, surprising, and the wren's song, also very stereotypically birdsong-like, is all repeated trills and tremolo, a bit like the jabbing bits of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring' in its rhythmic structures, only faster and more violent.

Below are some brief recordings of the songs of the dunnock, robin and wren, so you can hear the differences. I made them myself. You won't be able to see the birds very well, if at all. Spring is coming. The birds will all start to sing, and knowing who the songs belong to makes it sound more like they are singing to you.

Dunnock

Robin

Wren

The starlings, they are still here, just about

(This was written two years ago about a trip to see starlings on Valentine's Day. It's a bit more poetic than the normal posts. At the bottom there is some footage from that day with music by White Tiger, so you can actually see the birds I'm writing about for once.)

16^th February 2010

  

Before sunset, on the way home, we remembered our plan to go and see the starlings on the pier. It was a unseasonably sunny day, which would surely lure the birds out on a murmuration trip.

As we approached the pier we struggled to see any sign of the birds. We almost turned back but then Rose saw some high above the middle of the pier, a small cloud of them, only visible when they turned towards us a ripple of density.

So we continued towards them.

People stood in our way: friends unmoved by the spectacle behind them: small talk, small unthreatening obstacles, only small delay. The other Valentines couples are oblivious of foraying nature; they are on the pier for different honours.

At the moment the weather alternates between one day sunny, bordering on warm, and one day rainy, windy and cold; but when there are three nice days in a row, the starlings will fly away back to Norway. If it’s getting warmer here then back home it should be getting warmer too, but this place, this England can be confusing; there can be a day of glorious sunshine but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Summer yet or that the day after will be as nice. But when there are three nice days in a row, then surely they will be safe to go back.

Small puffs of collected animals linger and twist. If they were one entity connected by fibre and bones they wouldn’t achieve such smooth and perfect morphisms.

In flight their formations are profound and perfect but when they land, they land on each others’ heads, they bicker for space, push and scramble inelegantly and noisily on the arcade roof.

And then the sun goes down and they go to bed below the pier.