Since moving house to live on the moor one of the things I’ve been working on during walks is improving my understanding of bird calls. I knew some of the common bird calls from childhood, such as a blackbird’s alarm call, the magpie’s ‘cack cack’, and the rook’s ‘caw caw’, but many of the flutes, beeps and trills I heard walking up the lane were a mystery to me.

I tend to wake up early and listen to the radio programme ‘Farming Today’ with my morning cup of tea. Just afterwards there is a short programme of only one minute called ‘Tweet of the Day’ that tells the story of a presenter’s birding experience together with the bird’s call. 

It’s a delightful little programme that sets me up for the day (I switch off quickly afterwards before the grumpy news comes on at 6 am!). I’ve also found on ‘listen again’ some extended versions of Tweet of the Day that last up to 5 minutes, ah the simple joys in life. Curlews and corncrakes!

Tweet of the Day got me started on learning bird calls, but the real breakthrough came when I downloaded an app on my ‘phone called ‘Chirp Birdsongs’ that has all the British bird calls and even a ‘test yourself’ quiz. This helped me sort out the common calls of birds such as robins, blackbirds and wrens. 

Now I hear wrens everywhere even though they’re not often seen as they’re such tiny birds and hide in foliage and the gaps in dry stone walls. For such a small bird it has a very loud call with a distinctive trill section amongst the fluting. It’s the trill that’s the give away. 

Having a mnemonic to remind yourself of the call is helpful. Every time a chaffinch calls I now think of a cricketer coming up to bowl – there’s the run up and then the ball is released. Some calls speak for themselves of course. Chiff chaffs say chiff chaff and cuckoos say cuckoo; and the yellow hammer says, “a little bit of bread and no cheeeese”.

One of my successes was finally working out the call of the snipe (rather than its drumming noise at dusk or in the night, which is incredibly eerie and made by the feathers as the snipe does a mid-air dive). I like to go and sit on the moor above a place I call the Vale of the Curlews because the curlews fly up and down with their wonderful looping wirralling call. 

But there was another call that puzzled me, and I just couldn’t work it out. Eventually I tracked it down as a snipe by a process of elimination and have been rather smug and pleased with myself ever since. Now every time I hear the snipe call I remember the Seamus Heaney poem ‘A Kite for Michael and Christopher’ where he writes:

My friend says that the human soul

is about the weight of a snipe,

You don’t have to live on the moor to enjoy bird song, any city park or garden will do just as well. A study on the effect on people to listening to birds found that it was very beneficial to well-being and mental health. You don’t need to identify the birds calling, just listening does the trick. Though identifying can add to the fun and give you that lovely feeling of accomplishment when you do finally work out which bird it is.

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/27/bird-birdsong-encounters-improve-mental-health-study