Bit of a messy ‘un

Olivier Messiaen would have been 109 today. In part to commemorate his birthday, and in part because it seems Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? will shortly be going to print (don’t get too excited – Christmas in publishing, as in all other walks of life, lasts about three months), I’m going to share an extract from it in which I talk a bit about his music and his relationship with birds, among other things.

With the book going to print, it will soon be too late to buy the supporters’ edition – they’ll only print a certain number of them, and once they’re gone, they’re gone. While the trade edition (which will be on sale in the bookshops etc from May next year) will be a thing of beauty in its own right, the supporters’ edition is going to be a bit special, if the designs I’ve seen are anything to go by. So feel free to jump in here before it’s too late.

Anyway, here’s the extract. It describes my second attempt to see the alluring and elusive nightjar. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please feel free to share it far and wide.

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The lure of the nightjar is strong, and Ashdown Forest on a Saturday evening isn’t a long drive from south London. One more try. Oh, go on then.

I go down early. A couple of hours in the late afternoon sun, maybe mopping up a crossbill or even a turtle dove, an hour of nightjar vigil, then home. I might even snaffle a woodcock if I’m lucky.

As if to underline the futility of my endeavour, six birds, little brown dots against an early evening sky, fling their mocking calls at me like bullets before bouncing out of view in the middle distance. Linnets. Or goldfinches. Or greenfinches. Not crossbills. I don’t think.

Look, I don’t know, OK? They were small and brown and vindictive. That’s all I’ve got.

Before I descend into an impenetrable slough of despond, I’m saved by another bird. I remember it from the previous visit. Andrew and I had almost given up on seeing it when a couple of flurries of activity alerted us first to its presence, and then almost immediately to its absence. It had done what all birds do when they see me: dive under cover and wait until the coast is clear. But Andrew exerted his god-like powers of birdery on it, and it emerged, eventually perching on top of a spruce like a Christmas angel for a few minutes before flying off to taunt someone else.

This one is treating me to a display of vocalisation and acrobatics that catches the attention from a hundred yards away. I inch towards it, hoping it will ignore my presence and continue with the show. As its song sinks in, it triggers long-lost memories in my brain, and before I know it I’m humming the piccolo part from figure four of the third movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie.

My first year as a percussionist at the Royal Academy of Music involved total immersion in an unfamiliar world. Not only was I called upon to do more practice than I’d ever imagined possible, it became painfully clear how narrow my musical education had been so far. It wasn’t just that I’d never played any of this music before – I’d never even heard of the composers. It was a strange and disgraceful dereliction of my duty as a wannabe professional musician. So when I was told that we would be participating in a festival of music by Olivier Messiaen, one of the major musical figures of the twentieth century, my reaction was one of blank incomprehension, followed by a hasty trip to the Academy’s record library.

The music I listened to in the following days, and performed a few weeks later, was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Why had nobody told me about this stuff? It mixed dense and complex harmonies with oriental and exotic sounds from outside the canon of Western classical music I’d grown up listening to. There were moments of chaos, savagery, angularity, peaceful beauty and delicious ecstasy, all underpinned with an overt spiritual quality that spoke even to my uncompromisingly heathen soul.

Most important in my appreciation of Messiaen, though, was his use of shedloads of percussion. Xylophones, gongs, drums, cymbals, wood blocks, bells, shakers, wind machines and much more, even instruments of his own invention, like the geophone (Take a large drum. Fill the bottom with lead shot. Swirl it around to invoke the sound of the shifting and cracking earth.)

His philosophy towards percussionists was admirable: ‘Keep them busy. At least it’ll stop them going to the pub.’

For one used to sitting at the back and occasionally going ting, this opened up a new world of possibility, but there was another aspect of this music I found just as beguiling.

Messiaen had a fascination with birds, and would spend hours roaming the countryside with a notebook, transcribing the songs he heard. He incorporated these sounds into his music, even devoting whole pieces (for example Catalogue d’Oiseaux and Oiseaux Exotiques) to capturing the sound world and atmosphere evoked by birdsong, sometimes weaving his transcriptions into the fabric of the music, sometimes allowing them to stand alone, shorn of accompaniment.

This bird is a woodlark, and its distinctive fluting song, with a descending pattern that induces a faint melancholy in the listener, makes it a Messiaen bird. In the snippet it reminds me of, Messiaen used it as one of several layers of sound, each pursuing their own course regardless of the others, but somehow intersecting to produce an entrancing soundscape. Those few bars are on a loop in my head as I make the connection between the piccolo in the orchestra and the bird in front of me. An earworm from a woodlark. There’s a title of a piece of music in there somewhere.

The one I saw with Andrew seemed content to perch on its tree, but this one is determined to give me a proper display. It sits atop a gorse bush, bounces across to a neighbouring one, then takes off, climbing half-high before sailing down like a paper aeroplane and landing on the first bush again, all the while giving out its plaintive song. It’s a magical piece of theatre. I near as dammit applaud.

If only I could say the same for the cricket match I stumble upon ten minutes later. It’s the kind of thing I’ve participated in countless times, an admirable display of sporting incompetence in which error is met with blunder, countered by catastrophe, and then topped with laughable ineptitude.

But it’s a cricket match, so I stop and watch. After ten minutes I revise my assessment that the game is unworthy of applause. Collective uselessness of this order is a rare thing, and can only be the result of many hours of hard graft. I offer the players a silent ‘bravo’ and continue on my way.

Forty-five sweaty minutes later, I’m beginning to think I should have stayed for the end of the match. I’ve walked along a stream in the woods below, hoping to spot a grey wagtail. But there are none. I’ve tripped over equal numbers of tree roots and protruding rocks, and the detour has yielded nothing more than a talkative wren and a confiding robin. Cherished birds, both of them, but no more exciting than the ones I can watch from the comfort of my own kitchen.

As I emerge from the woods and back towards the car, I have my reward.

It’s a willow warbler, the kind of summer bird an experienced birder would barely give a second glance. But I’ve identified it from its song, and this is still a rare enough occurrence to give my confidence a bit of a boost.

And then there’s the song itself.

This willow warbler’s song is a thing of great and melancholy beauty. Soft in tone, its shape resembles the song of a chaffinch, but one crossbred with Marvin the Paranoid Android. After a reasonably lively opening few notes, it takes on a plaintive quality as it descends, conveying indefinable feelings of regret and loneliness. But then at the end there’s an ornament, a skip in the step, a moment of uplift, the unexpected Jaffa Cake hiding beneath the Rich Tea in the biscuit tin of life.

This willow warbler seems happy to share its thoughts with me for fifteen minutes, so I head for my appointment with the nightjar in chipper mood.

According to local knowledge, there’s a particular bench from which the birds can be observed, and I’m heading for it when I run into a trim and organised-looking man, mild, about my age, and wearing a pair of binoculars slung round his neck.

Call it a hunch, but I think he might be a birder.

He seems to know where he’s heading, and doesn’t object to my tagging along, but neither of us is particularly inclined towards conversation. I maintain my aversion to the ‘Anything about?’ gambit, and in any case it wouldn’t be appropriate. We both know what’s about. There’s no need to declare an interest. It’s implicit from our very presence.

So there’s a nod of greeting, no more, and we make our way to the likely spot and wait for the nightjar to show its moth- like face.

We wait. And we wait. And we wait. Vladimir and Estragon, working our way through Act Two.

Dusk descends, taking away the details of the surrounding heath and wood by stealth. Before us is a broad expanse of bracken and gorse. Beyond, the dark woods, vaguely threatening. The air isn’t uncomfortably cold, but neither is it balmy, and I’m glad to have kept my coat on. Nightjar prefer to display on warm evenings, and I suspect early on that this endeavour is a busted flush.

I’m diverted by the appearance of a bird just above the treeline. It has a distinctive dumpy shape, a comparatively long bill, and its outline is stark against the dusky sky. It’s flying fast and straight, and in a second it’s gone.

Woodcock. Tick.

As it disappears, I hear the faintest sound, an impossibly distant high-pitched purr. Estragon hears it at the same time, and we look towards it, cupping our ears.

It’s not until you do this that you realise how effective an amplifier a cupped hand can be. What was almost inaudible now becomes merely very faint indeed. And then, just as we get a handle on it, it dims and stops. I’m half inclined to walk towards it, but the chances of tracking it down are slim. With a shrug we settle back down to the wait, hoping the sound will set off another, closer one. Our efforts are hindered by the insistent trillings of at least two song thrushes.

The minutes pass, as they do. It becomes obvious our wait will be in vain. It’s a good time to remind myself that birding is never a waste of time. At the very least I’ve had a nice walk in attractive surroundings. It feels like scant consolation.

At about twenty to ten we unanimously decide to call it a night, although I do another lap before returning to the car, just in case the nightjar was waiting for Estragon to leave before making its appearance. The moon is up, veiled behind thin cloud. An invisible stonechat flits among the bracken. Tsip-clink, tsip- clink.

I linger for a minute in the car park, hoping against hope for a low-flying nightjar to come and surprise me. But there’s nothing except me and the emptiness of the forest, silent in the moonlight.

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