The song thrush stopped his (or her, but it's more likely his) day-long virtuoso performance a few weeks ago. But, the books say, it should resume about October. What a session; you would grudge nobody their nightingales. This was a feast of song, delivered practically day long from the top of a cypress tree and from first light, if not slightly earlier. The song thrush has a large repertoire of simple phrases, repeated but in varying sequence. And the bird is a good mimic. Whistle like a curlew or even an oriole, and you may get the notes played back to you. All this because of a doleful article, well-illustrated in the magazine of The Sunday Times, showing the decline in Britain of their songbirds. The melodious thrush is down by 52 per cent since 1972; the skylark ("Hail to thee, blithe spirit") is even more endangered, having fallen by 60 per cent in the same period; likewise the yellowhammer, but worst of all is the tree sparrow which is down by 87 per cent. Blackbirds are less hit: down only (only!) by 33 per cent, but the lapwing, the pee-wee, falls by 42 per cent. The writer, Richard Girling, is more than emphatic about the reasons for the fall.
"Each time we go to the supermarket we wipe another voice from the dawn chorus. Between us, UK shoppers and taxpayers have paid to take more birds out of the sky than all the battalions of pheasant-shooters and Mediterranean hunting-broilers put together." They have gone, he writes, because the consumer wants vegetables of identical size and colour, and would rather have that than have his or her ears assailed by the din of a lark. And you the consumer would rather eat pesticide residues in your vegetables than suffer a bent carrot.
A bit over the top, some of this, but he gets his point home. The "precipitous decline" of farmyard birds can be dated fairly precisely to the acceleration of the agrochemical age in the 1970s and early 1980s. "Out went mixed farms and old-fashioned crop rotations, in came cereal monocultures, in which similar crops were grown on the same fields year after year." You've read it before. How do we do in Ireland? Well, one plus is that we haven't rooted out our hedges to anything like the extent that they have gone from English fields. Seed-eaters, for example, still can find the plants that sustain them. We have, as elsewhere, lost so many corncrakes due to new farming methods and one expert tells that the yellow-hammer, a lovely bird, has more or less disappeared.
In short, we too are losing our songbirds and cannot look down our noses at anyone, but we'll ask the experts.