It’s not a ‘song’. It’s a distress call

It took a single chapter in a book to utterly shatter once and for all my romantic illusions about the beauty of birdsong.

The book is called ‘Divorce among the Gulls’ by an American naturalist named William Jordan. The chapter was about the Mockingbird, a thrush-like bird native to North America, which acquired its name by mimicking whatever sound it hears and incorporating it into its own repertoire.

Jordan is hardly the first writer to take an interest in bird calls. Much more famously, John Keats was inspired in 1811 by the distant sound of a nightingale in the woods to write what is probably the most enduring literary homage to the beauty of birdsong of all time.

‘Ode to A Nightingale’ may be a magnificent poem in its own right – it’s also one of my favourites from that era – so I’m not knocking the Romantic poetic genius when I point out that its magnificence rests squarely on Keats’ understanding of the human condition… and NOT on his understanding of birds.

In fact, as a contribution towards ornithology, I am sorry to say that ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is actually just a load of twitter.

It took William Jordan – who, unlike Keats, actually understood a thing or two about birds – to dispel the absurd notion that a nightingale would “sing of summer in full-throated ease” because it was “too happy in [its] happiness”. It also took an ornithologist to explain that mockingbirds (and, by extension, nightingales and all other small birds) are not, as Keats so naively puts it, unaware of the existence of fear, pain, suffering and death.

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,” my foot. The very reason birds ‘sing’ in the first place is precisely because they are painfully aware of the imminent possibility that death and danger may in fact be lurking right behind the next “melodious plot of beechen green”.

The truth is that birds sing primarily for two reasons, and neither is particularly poetic or even beautiful. The first is to demarcate territory and to ward off potential intruders; the second is to attract mates. Hence the rather pathetic nature of birdsong, to those who can actually understand what is being ‘sung’.

By singing its heart out in the bushes, a nightingale will in reality be transmitting to all and sundry – i.e., rivals and potential mates – vital information about its own genetic composition. Other nightingales will know from the pitch and duration of the song exactly how old, young, strong or weak that male bird is; and this in turn bears two weighty implications.

Females can judge whether the singing male is a good enough genetic match to sire their own offspring. Rivals, on the other hand, can judge whether it has the strength to fight them off in combat.

As the bird ages and weakens, its song will also reflect its own sapping strength. Eventually younger and healthier males will drive it out of its territory, and it will be forced to find another territory, occupied by a weaker bird, to ‘invade’. It is a contest in which only the strong and healthy survive; and Jordan illustrates this by recording mockingbirds and playing back the recordings in their territory.

The result is frantic panic among birds thinking they were being invaded by rivals. And while it still sounds beautiful to our ears, the beauty of their ‘song’ also conceals all the terror and urgency of a desperate, no-holds-barred struggle for survival.

Stripped of all the poetry with which we ignorant humans have endowed it, birdsong is not ‘song’ at all. It is a distress call. And applied to the concept of keeping songbirds in tiny cages, the implications are rather upsetting to people who actually care about birds and wildlife in general (a category that evidently excludes Roderick Galdes, the parliamentary secretary for – if you’ll allow the ugly irony – ‘animal rights’).

In Malta, the sight and sound of visibly distressed birds, kept in cages only marginally less tiny than themselves, used to be fairly common until quite recently. I remember them on the schoolbus, for instance. Our driver used to keep a little goldfinch next to the gear box.

As a small child who loved birds, I paid close attention to that poor thing fluttering desperately about in a cage roughly half the size of a shoebox, inhaling petrol fumes as it poured out its misery in endless melodious twitter. Unsurprisingly the bird had to be regularly replaced. One finch after another literally sang itself to death in that cage… and everyone thought the song was ‘beautiful’, and that the bird itself was (of all things) ‘happy’.

The same tragic and woefully misunderstood scene unfolded almost everywhere you looked in this country until 2009. That was when Malta was finally compelled to fully transpose the European Wild Birds Directive, which specifically forbids trapping of European wild birds at any time of year.

The adjective ‘wild’ is highly important in this context, by the way. The same concept does not apply to birds that have been bred in captivity for generations… like the canaries, budgies and Zebra finches you can buy from any pet shop. With those birds, the opposite is true. Their life expectancy outside the cage would be minimal to zero.

Trapping wild birds and keeping them in tiny cages is however different. It is simply cruel – no other word to describe it. There are also conservation issues to contend with; the birds are caught using clap-nets, which are designed to catch not one, but as many birds as possible in one go. Its impact on populations of wild birds is therefore far greater than the shooting of a single specimen.

The size of the cages they are kept in is also significant. It has long been observed that birds ‘sing more’ when kept in such tiny confined spaces. Birdsong is territorial: and the cage, to the bird’s mind, will represent the size and limits of its ‘territory’. The smaller the cage, the more vulnerable and exposed to competition its occupant will feel, so the more it sings… and sings… and sings… frantically, desperately (and, it must be said, valiantly) trying to defend a territory in which it constantly feels under attack.

Part of the reason I supported the idea of EU membership in the first place was precisely so that this and other corresponding barbarities would eventually be consigned to the dustbin of history, where they so clearly belong. But as with Spring hunting, it appears the EU doesn’t care too much about birdlife, biodiversity, barbarity and other things that begin with ‘B’.

Nor does it particularly care about the transposition of its rules and regulations onto national legislation. Otherwise there is no way it would have consented – as it evidently has – to the resuscitation of this mediaeval practice a mere 10 years after accession, for no apparent reason other than to appease a politically powerful local lobby.

The greater irony, however, concerns the way in which the course of history has been reversed on this particular issue. Roderick Galdes, whose job is supposedly to safeguard the welfare of animals, has just spent the better part of his year-and-a-half in that position seeking ways to maximise distress and panic among little birds: which, thanks to his tireless work, will now once again be caught in clap-nets as they come in to roost after crossing the Mediterranean, and kept in tiny cages for the rest of their miserable, unhappy and short life.

By his own admission, he looked for, and found, a ‘loophole’ that would allow this awful practice to continue – blatantly disregarding the fact that his official title in the cabinet should by rights have had him fighting on the clean opposite side: i.e., to discontinue an ugly and cruel tradition that makes a total mockery of the ‘rights’ of at least one category of animal.

I have looked closely at his behaviour throughout his brief tenure of office, and to date have not detected a single endeavour to actually safeguard the rights of animals. On the contrary, he has vehemently protected the rights only of those who clearly think that animals exist only to massage their own egos, and who take pleasure only in their misery.

It has been pointed out elsewhere, but it is worth repeating here. If this is Galdes’ idea of safeguarding ‘animal rights’, we should all be thankful that ‘human rights’ are not also part of his portfolio.

Meanwhile I am not naïve enough to think that he will resign in the wake of his manifest failure to live up to even the most basic demands of his office – or at least, be moved to another position where he could do less damage to animal welfare – but, all things considered, I do expect the Prime Minister to change the name of the portfolio.

I recommend “Parliamentary Secretary for Animal Frights”. At least, it would be honest…