"Songbirds in Britain are losing their tunes. A study has found that traffic noise has rendered many of the birds tone deaf, turning their beautiful songs into harsh cackles." This is from a story in last week's Sunday Times. And it goes on to say that this is catastrophic for some species which depend on song to find a mate. Apparently the study which led to these conclusions originated with Dr Piet Bergers of the Dutch Institute for Forestry and Nature Research, who investigated the conditions in both countries. He stressed that birds had highly sensitive hearing. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, held to be Britain's biggest wildlife charity, said the findings confirmed its worst fears. Another finding of the report apparently tells of birds in urban surroundings forgetting their own songs and imitating "sounds they hear most often, such as mobile telephones and car alarms and horns." (Couldn't they do this also without having forgotten their own tune? Isn't it a starling which answers back or talks irrelevantly to Tristran Shandy?)
The report shows, according to the article, that traffic noise disrupted bird behaviour for up to two miles on each side of a busy road - one carrying up to 60,000 vehicles a day - while roads carrying up to 10,000 per day were affected similarly for up to a mile on either side. Birds in these areas had fewer tones and notes, and their songs were harsher. And they had the same trouble finding mates. Other species affected most were cuckoo, magpie and woodcock. Probably the most threatening result of it all is the consequential bad affect on breeding. You would like to know how Holland's coverage of motorways compares with that of Britain. A leading British ornithologist is quoted as saying how dangerous it would be to allow further road expansion. Added to all this, we remember Rachel Carson and her dire predictions about the effect on birds of the new farming and new pesticides.
But one interesting question arises from all this. Nearly a century ago a large part of France was for four years never out of the sound of insistent artillery, machine-gun fire and bombs of various kinds. What of those birds, for they didn't all flee to the quiet south, did they? And what of the night after night bombing of Berlin and its surroundings by British planes? There were plenty of open spaces for birds to inhabit, as in the extensive Grunewald. Perhaps some naturalist has written about this. It would be an interesting footnote to the second World War. Y