Poisoned spring

Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, by Michael McCarthy

Wings and Rings: A History of Bird Migration Studies in Europe, by Richard Vaughan

On a May night in 1967, walking home down a Dorset farm track, I counted the song of 13 nightingales. Today in those woods no nightingale is heard. For 40 years I visited a bridge on the Dorset Stour to watch sand martins nesting in the riverbank. Since 1984 they have vanished. In 2002 I wrote a letter to the Times, headed ‘The last cuckoo’, to note that for the first time in decades I had not heard the cuckoo arriving on the button (17 April in Dorset, 18 April in Somerset), My letter was not printed.

One of the tragedies of our fast-changing world has been the dramatic decline in the numbers of those migrant birds which since time immemorial have been what Michael McCarthy, in his lovely but heart-tugging book, calls ‘the bringers of spring’ — the ‘great aerial river’ of 16 million birds flooding up from Africa between March and May to fill our island with the songs of chiff-chaffs and blackcaps, the aerial displays of swallows and swifts, and that most evocative of all spring sounds, the ‘wandering voice’ of the cuckoo.

Although Aristotle wrote about migration, as McCarthy deftly recounts it, it is barely a century since we first began to understand the scale and nature of these miraculous wanderings, and since, thanks to the pioneers of ringing, we first grasped how many of the birds we identify with springtime Britain are as much African as British.

McCarthy’s theme is twofold: to give us a vivid picture of what we have learned scientifically about the birds themselves, but then beautifully to interweave it with the ‘human response’, in poetry, in music, in all the devotion given by countless bird-lovers to the sight and sound of these small creatures which add such an extraordinary dimension to our lives.

The book focusses on eight species, each given a delightfully discursive profile, but which he then tracks down with the aid of an expert. Before hearing nightingales in the wilds of Surrey, for instance, he traces what this bird has stood for in European culture right up to Eric Maschwitz’s nightingale which never sang in Berkeley Square. He is entranced by the sedge warbler imitating a host of other birds on the Norfolk Broads, conveys how the wood warbler evokes the spirit of those Welsh oak woods which are its last fastness, meets the ‘flycatcher gang’ who keep a beady eye on every spotted flycatcher sallying across the gardens of a Cotswold village.

He searches out the vanishing turtle dove, poetic emblem of fidelity, in the Norfolk breckland, rejoices in the aerobatics of the swallow and of swifts creeling over a north London garden. Finally, on Wicken Fen, he is amazed to hear Nick Davies, the Cambridge Professor of Behavioural Ecology, summoning up cuckoos with a perfect imitation, before telling us that the Times, which anthologised its once famous letters column as ‘The First Cuckoo’, hasn’t printed a ‘first cuckoo’ letter since 1940 (let alone my ‘last cuckoo’ effort seven years back).

But here a dreadful shadow falls, as McCarthy charts the catastrophic decline of so many migrant species in recent decades. In just 13 years the numbers of cuckoos and swifts have collapsed by 40 per cent, flycatchers, nightingales, turtle doves by nearly two thirds. Although no reason given for this disaster quite fits the bill — pesticides, changing climate, environmental degradation in Africa — McCarthy leaves us with a sense that something mysterious and terrible is happening to our world.

A valuable footnote to this mighty story is Wings and Rings by Richard Vaughan, a onetime professor of medieval history but also a distinguished ornithologist, who provides a fascinating picture of how the study of bird migration began, centred round four remarkable men. Heinrich Gätke became the ‘uncrowned king’ of Heligoland, in the days when this tiny islet off the north German coast was a 19th-century British possession, for the expertise with which he classified the vast flocks of migrants which sought it as a refuge, often by shooting and stuffing them for sale. Hans Christian Mortensen was the Danish schoolteacher who around 1900 rendered this unnecessary by inventing ‘ringing’. Johannes Theinemann at the same time founded the world’s first proper bird observatory, still there on the major migration route of the Courland Spit, a 60-mile stretch of pine-clad Baltic coast. W. Eagle Clarke, in charge of natural history at the Edinburgh Museum, turned the lighthouse keepers of Britain into systematic record-keepers of the migrants attracted, often fatally, to their lights. Vaughan’s expert account will delight serious birdwatchers.