"I can still hear the birds sing" was a line in John Bowman's Saturday programme on Joe Lynch. The context is forgotten, but the wisdom and positive element of it will stay with many listeners. Apart from the real bird-watching folk and those from whose studies the rest of us learn so much, many people are simply grateful for the presence and song of birds and know just a little about a few of the more common species.
The melodious song thrush and blackbird have made this a notable spring, in spite of the rain and the cold, for an area in south Dublin. From the top of a 50 foot cypress they have, in turn, delivered a daily concert that lifts the heart. On and on. You go out and whistle with them. This stops them for only a few seconds, then they ignore you. Most people say that the blackbird is the better singer, that he outranks the thrush because the latter repeats the same song without the blackbird's liking for variations. The robin is not so consistent, but his song is clear and pure - "a melodious, somewhat plaintive warbling", according to David Cabot.
To the sounds of summer a couple of generations ago, in many areas where the voices of the cuckoo and, above all, the corncrake were heard. North Belfast, in parts long built over, resounded in the evenings with the voice of the corncrake. Lovers huddled under raincoats or rugs beneath hawthorns on the rocky road that led steeply to the Horseshoe Bend, says a learned note in a diary of a long-departed friend, were never out of range of that rasping, wholesome sound. The Belfast Naturalists field club issued a book A Guide to Belfast and the Counties of Down and Antrim to mark the meeting of the British Association in that city in 1902, edited by Francis Joseph Bigger, Lloyd Praeger and John Vinycomb. "In summer the cuckoo is common and heard everywhere." Likewise with the corncrake "a very common summer visitor, but it has several times been taken here in winter".
As well as the melody-makers and these individual voices, which we welcome but would not classify as good songsters, there are birds we admire for their antics or their individualities. The rooks and jackdaws picking at the grass for their prey which does as much good to a lawn as the best dressing. The ravens, (why did the raven in Poe's poem keep on answering on the one note: "Quoth the raven, never more."? Anyway, a couple in a nearby county swear that ravens like human company and a pair regularly veers off course when husband and wife are out on the ground, as they make for their night roost, and invariably croak some sort of brief greeting: "You again" for example. The beauty of birds and birdsong, the engineering quality of their nest-building . . . you cannot admire birds enough.