It’s not as if authors haven’t been trying to inject a little precision into descriptions of bird song for some time; the authors of Witherby’s Sound Guide (North & Simms 1958) first suggested that you can represent: “… comparative pitch… by what is known as the ‘vowel scale’, where ee, for instance, indicates a note of high pitch, ah of mediumpitch and oo of low pitch. If the syllables are whispered it will be found that the vowels do in fact sound according to this scale, and a whisper is itself of high pitch and thus likely to approximate to the pitch of a bird-call better than the human voice. ... These usually sound silly, but are so useful that the silliness is worth putting up with”.

I think my problems with this all come back to one thing. If I suggest that Cetti’s Warbler song goes twack twack… diddlediddle... twack twack, apart from sounding silly this implies that the species sings only one song. As I have explained, however, if you listen carefully it doesn’t.

It was during a holiday with my family in Cyprus that I first started really listening to bird sounds. It was Easter 1994, and I had never recorded a bird sound before. I have a good friend, Jeff Osment. Just to show how good, he wrote a book about our friendship (The Road to Pelindaba, 2018). Jeff is a filmmaker and he had sound recording gear, which I borrowed to see how I got on with bird sound recording

I took a villa with my family in the hills above the Baths of Aphrodite on the island of Cyprus. Not knowing much about my own family history, I always had a romantic notion that with a name like Constantine I probably had Greek-speaking forbears, possibly from Cyprus. Jeff’s book based on the exploration of my family tree sorted that out; my forebears come from Bolton but hey, he hadn’t written the book back then.

At the back of the villa was a deep, dry riverbed in a stony gulley. During the day it was a great place to hear migrants fly over – Greater Short-toed Larks Calandrella brachydactyla, Tawny Pipits Anthus campestris, yellow wagtails Motacilla sp and Ortolan Buntings Emberiza hortulana – while Great Tits Parus major and European Goldfinches Carduelis carduelis were singing in the pines scattered along the gulley. Intrigued by the differences between calls of Thrush Nightingale Luscinia luscinia and Common Nightingale L megarhynchos, and curious to hear how Cyprus Scops Owl Otus cyprius and Eurasian Scops Owl O scops differed, I would sit out after dark listening and now recording.

Using Jeff’s tape recorder and gun microphone, suddenly I could hear the strange gulping sound Common Quails Coturnix coturnix make before their wet-my-lips, then there was all that amazing detail in Eurasian Stone-curlew Burhinus oedicnemus calls and wow, that noise like a coffee machines steamer must be one of the calls of Common Barn Owl Tyto alba. I got very excited on hearing a deep series of hoots roughly one every three seconds. For three nights I was up recording what I assumed was a Long-eared Owl Asio otus in the pines.

After a few nights of hooting I searched for physical signs of the owls, walking the gulley right down to the sea. I stopped to watch Common Ostriches Struthio camelus displaying at a local ostrich farm. Their displays were silent and extremely flouncy, but I started to wonder if they got noisier after dark. That night I revisited, and sure enough their visual displays had been replaced with repetitive deep hoots.

Having solved my first sound mystery, I moved on to another. An hour or so before dawn there was this song, a sort of fast Chip chip didy chip given repeatedly around six or seven times a minute, with a call note here and there. After several mornings I traced it to a Cetti’s Warbler, but why wasn’t it singing ‘normally’. That mystery took 25 years to solve.

Magnus asked me the other day if I have been listening differently since my weeks with the Don. No not really, that happened way before I met him. In the last article I mentioned Don Kroodsma’s book The Singing Life of Birds (2005). What I didn’t say was that I have imagined being invited onto BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs and having got through my ten favourite bird songs, choosing this as my only book. If I could only take a few pages, it would be where he describes listening as pre-dawn songs of Chestnut-sided Warblers Setophaga pensylvanica sweep over the forested hills of Berkshire, Massachusetts.

In it, Don listens to song after song, comparing as the birds sing pre-dawn from their densely packed territories. Typically, he marks the sequence in which new song phrases appear or return using A, B, C and so on, thereby working out how songs are structured and varied, and how each individual Chestnut-sided Warbler’s song differs from its neighbour’s. While this is true before dawn, half an hour later they all converge on any of just four variations of the more stereotypical pleased.. pleased.. pleased.. to meetcha.

So Chestnut-sided Warblers sing pre-dawn songs just like my Cetti’s Warblers on Cyprus. But why haven’t I heard Cetti’s pre-dawn song in Poole or Weymouth where they abound?

I was brought up in Weymouth. Not so interested in birds then, I preferred pond life. The best place for pond dipping, especially for the rare, nasty and much sought-after Water Scorpion Nepa cinerea, was Chafeys Lake, a marshy area at the top end of the Radipole RSPB reserve. While Cetti’s Warbler was arriving from France and colonising Chafeys Lake so Mo, Jeff and I moved from Weymouth to London, and by 1978 when we moved back, there were 12 singing males.