For months now a song thrush has been pouring out daily, from the top of a very tall cypress tree, a most brilliant and inspiring flow of melody, loud and clear, with variations and repetitions. If you stand well back from it and whistle too, it will sometimes pause, as if in response - or maybe just waiting for you to go away. It occupies one or other of the two peak twigs of the topmost branches and seems to sing only from there. Under ordinary conditions, writes David Cabot, the song will carry for 400 metres. From this topmost-tree vantage point, with no buildings or large trees in front of the bird as it throws its song, the distance might well be more. On occasion the bird or its mate has brought the young down to a pool with running water, where many birds have an evening splash. Which brings to mind a book mentioned here about a year ago, published in French, but it may now be in English, for the author's works are often translated. The book was called Oiseaux, merveilleux oiseaux, in which he tells of their amazing feats of navigation and other achievements which we often just put down to "instinct".
Hubert Reeves, astronomer, astrophysicist, dedicates the book to the birds: To the melancholy singing of the robin/During the long spring evenings./To the boisterous ballet of the swallows in the sunrise/When above the pond their flights/ Criss- cross, skimming the surface and ascending again/Into the blue sky./I dedicate this book to the wrens and the warblers/Who greet me when, in early morning,/I walk in the countryside. And he concludes this dedication: It is in their company that I have written this book./I am grateful for the happiness they have brought me. He explains that he became ill early in 1997 after an expedition to the Sahara where, night after night he lay on the sand observing the stars and the Hale-Bopp comet. He was then hospitalised in France, a serious operation and complications. "The idea of death became sweet to me."
But one night he looked out at the stars and recalled the song of Mahler for a dead friend: "You no longer hear the ringing of the bells, you no longer hear the song of the birds, you see neither sun nor moon." This book, writes Reeves, "is also for those who are tired of life." Y