Working from home, I’m heeding the counsel of master self-isolators. Every spring, male songbirds carve out their own inviolate space. This row of urban semis and small gardens is a constant racket of avian announcements and warnings. It begins with the robin’s plaintive heralding of first light. If I shook off the duvet’s warmth and peeped through the curtains, I’d see him on his regular streetlight songpost. But I tell myself the movement will disturb him, so I lie on to listen for the dunnock. He’s due any minute. I tense with waiting, praying that his predilection for the garden’s low bushes has not meant that he has succumbed to a cat overnight. Ah! There’s his cheery warble. I can get up.
Breakfast is both strangely quiet and startlingly noisy. I live under an airport flight path that’s weirdly muted. But the absence of planes magnifies the birdsong. That chaffinch with his individual take on the terminal flourish of his species’ song. Two wrens rattling sabres across a no-go zone that includes our back garden. As the song of the one in the next street starts overlapping with that of two doors up, it’s only a matter of time. Song overlapping or matching is a sign of aggression. Eventually my neighbour’s wren falls silent. I settle to my laptop.
Throughout the day, I get more reminders of the importance of physical distancing. The tunes vary, but the message is the same. From the canopy fringing the River Lagan, an elevenses song thrush, his deliberate flutings clearly audible against the traffic’s lowered growl. Cosy house sparrow chatter accompanies lunch, but bursting through are slurred exhortations of a collared dove and a thin exasperation of a goldcrest. In the afternoon, the nearby pedestrian crossing beeps and a great tit responds with furious monosyllables. I wonder who has provoked him, for when I check the window there’s no one to be seen.
Evening: our blackbird has assumed his usual position on the chimney opposite. I stop to listen to his gorgeous baritone. And further away, another. And another. The chain of song reminds me of “all the birds” of Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop. “Farther and farther.” All heeding, all reminding each other: “Keep your distance, keep your distance.”
