News — Birds

Country Life Magazine (Print issue 6 May) Books Pages - Review by Mark Cocker

These magnificent flying machines 

One Day A Thousand Songs John Miller

Merlin Unwin Books £12

When it comes to public attention for Nature, it never ceases to amaze me how much birds dominate our airwaves.

Among charities, the RSPB has 1.2 million members, yet the wonderful invertebrate equivalent BugLife has 2,000.

If we look at the creatures they champion and their respective contributions to our world, there is no contest. There may be 210 British breeding birds, but there are more than 24,000 insect species, making them the largest component in all our biodiversity, so why do we love birds so disproportionately?

You perhaps couldn’t find a better summary of why these all-flying, all-singing dinosaur descendants capture our hearts than the three new bird books hatching this week.

Together with the gift of flight, the second major avian USP is indubitably their ability to make music. In One Day a Thousand Songs, John Miller tells us he’s been so transfixed by birdsong that he has, as it were, arranged his entire domestic affairs to increase its depth and volume. His whole garden seems shaped to meet avian needs; between 4:35am and 9:23pm last year, he set out to demonstrate why he does it. He logged everything, from tiny goldcrests to winged red kites that sang or vocalised on his patch. Then, on these 40 species, he supplies further information about their lifestyles, but especially on how we can all work to encourage them.

Mr Miller’s central message is not that we should cherish only birds, even less that we should single out their abilities to sing. Rather, he makes a powerful moral case that everything birds do and are derives from Nature as a whole. He argues for a bottom-up view of the living world that values what he calls ‘bio-abundance’, the maximum combined contribution of fungi, plants, trees, invertebrates and even soil-dwelling creatures that we neither know nor see. He asks us to understand birdsong in a radically new way, not as ethereal voices from above, but arising from the earth – in rotting vegetation, perhaps, or in the very soil itself.