Blackbird Has Spoken

It's time I came clean. This story is going to be hard to believe. I mean, I would be pretty sceptical if someone told me what I'm about to tell you. This year I actually spoke to a bird. And yes, that's the feathered variety. It's a true story. I might as well just tell it and you can make your own mind up. 

(by Joe Magee 2002)

It began last spring - 2001. I live in Bristol and have lived there for a few years. I moved into the house in question about 2 years ago - with my wife. I can't remember exactly when I first noticed them, but a couple of birds appeared in our garden, darting about, digging up worms in the cracks between our patio slabs. Its amazing how much life there is in those cracks. At first I instantly recognised one of the birds as a blackbird. The other one was more like a thrush - but as I became more interested and consulted a couple of books I had - I realised the second bird was also a blackbird - a female. Whoever named the species remains a nemesis of gender equality. Anyway, I'm no twitcher - but these two birds were new kids on the block, and I began to keep an eye out for them.

So. Summer begins to roll in and I'm spending a bit more time in the garden. Just taking breaks (I work at home) having a nice cup of coffee and chilling out, enjoying the sun when its out. These two birds are dodging about, doing their thing. Obviously they're wary of me. I sort of knew that if you kept still - birds couldn't really see you. It was the movement which they spotted. So when they showed up I'd keep really still and hope they'd get closer. I found them really amazing. I was especially keen on the male. Just its appearance. This weird orange-ringed beady eye that seemed to follow you about. I think it always knew I was there and it never got close. Bat an eyelid and the thing would be on the fence in a shot. I've since found that a bird's heart beats at six hundred a minute. Can you believe it? You'd be on the fence.

Anyway, one day I'm sitting there and the female arrives. And it seems well-docile. It lands on the patio and digs about a bit with its beak. I got pissed off with them sometimes if they dug about in the plant-pots. There'd be bits all over the place. On this occasion it was just half-heartedly pecking about. Then it looks at me and just sits down! I thought, 'weird'. And it just sat there looking straight at me, whistling the odd tune. I had some bread to hand. I used to take a bit out now and again - throwing bits to to try and attract them. So I threw some bits over and it was happy with that. Nearly choking on the big bits. And there it sat for an hour. Just looking at me as hard as I was looking at it. In the end I was doing allsorts - waving my hands around and so on - just to test how scared it was. And it just wasn't. Now and then the male partner arrived with a worm, fed it straight into her mouth and just took off immediately. Afterwards I thought that maybe she was pregnant. I don't know. She was happy enough to sit about anyway. I went inside in the end because I had stuff to do - but, and I know this sounds mad, I felt like I'd made some kind of spooky connection with the thing. I felt sort of compelled to see whether it could be, you know... developed.

Anyway, like I said, I pulled out a few books that were round the house about birds. Some of them had never seen the light of day - I kept them for referencing images - which is part of what I do for a living. And over a few weeks I swotted up on things like bird behaviour, bird songs, bird baths, bird everything. Stuff fell into place about which bird was up to what. So I started checking out the two blackbirds from an upstairs window and realised they were living a couple of back-gardens away - in a bush. They seemed kind of crafty about where they lived. Well, he did. He'd arrive on my back fence. Look about. Then he'd move to the tree next door. Look about. Then he'd double back. Look around. Next thing he's gone. It took ages to actually see where he was going. You'd just catch a twig shake. They're so fast.

Anyway - the songs. I never really heard them singing much in the day. Birds actually sing most first thing in the morning. They've usually sung their little lungs out before I even got out of bed. Oddly enough the blackbird is notable for being the first out of its nest and onto its perch in the morning. Next time you're trudging your way back from a late night session there's a good chance it's a blackbird that has you checking your watch. This must be why that song goes "morning has broken, blackbird has spoken". By sunrise they're all at it. My personal idea for why they do it at this time is because the airwaves are clear. No traffic, no car alarms, no noise pollution from us lot.

But the songs sort of interested me. What the hell were they all about? What had the little female been singing to me that day? I read in a book that a particular sparrow had been recorded as singing over two thousand separate songs in one day. Why? There are two reasons why birds sing. Yes I know the stated reasons: One, to mark their territory.. i.e. 'get off my manor', 'this is my patch, sling it'. And two, for amorous reasons.. ie 'hello, is it me you're looking for?", "fancy coming over to my nest later?" Fine. But two thousand songs? And, I forgot to mention, the blackbird is regarded as one of the best singers.

So, I go on the internet and see if there's much about birdsongs. Stupid question. I'm inundated with it. There's tons of the stuff - discussion lists, chat rooms, pictures, videos, every conceivable detail about birds is covered ten-fold. Probably bird-porn if you looked hard enough. People getting off on shaved chickens or something. Anyway. Of course there are also audio samples to be heard of birds singing. Loads of blackbirds. After surfing around a bit I end up on the BBC Natural History site listening to them. Then I notice that the BBC's Natural History Sound Library is in Bristol - 15 minutes away. So thought.. why not check out what they've got. Gave them a quick buzz and they were like "sure, just book yourself an appointment for next week". They charge ten quid an hour to just listen to their tapes.

So I went down there and - bloody hell! What a place. It had hundreds, maybe thousands of tapes of just blackbirds. Well, not JUST blackbirds... you know what I mean. These tapes were 'quarter inch tapes' - that's the actual width of the tape. Reels of about a foot in circumference stored in circular tins. All meticulously catalogued with dates, locations and the recordist's details. They were divided into either general soundscapes or 'close-ups' of particular birds. I'd said what I was after on the phone and there was an enormous pile of these tins waiting for me. Someone had fished out all the ones with blackbirds on. They showed me into a little room in the basement with a big tape deck and left me to it. The actual sound quality was incredible - really vivid stereo. You could really imagine where and when they were done. I imagined this one recordist, 'D.J.Tombs', getting out of bed at 2.30 in the morning, on the 4th July 1981, to get down to a spot in Filton so he could place a small microphone by the perch of the blackbird he knows better than his wife. And how he must feel when the bird rises and, on cue, sings note-perfect for the tape for a good hour or so. A feathered Pavarotti. And then back home Mr. Tombs has the tape in his deck before he can get his coat off - checking it's worked.

Well, I spent weeks down there listening to this stuff. I loved it. The crystal clear sounds preserved on tape. It began to drive me a bit mad. I was dreaming bird songs. Whistling birdsongs. If there was a birdsong to be heard I'd be hearing it. I'd be in the cinema watching a film and the next thing there are some birds in the background and I'm thinking, "blackbird. Must be southern England somewhere with a song like that". Then I'm thinking, "Jesus, sack the continuity person on this film - they're rubbish. How shoddy is that audio editing? did they use carpet tape to stick it together?" At the end I'm asking people if they heard it and they're looking at me blankly like, "what the hell are you on about?" I started waking early - now that was a sign something weird was happening. I'd lie listening to the dawn chorus. Hearing old songs, favourite songs, new songs. Some birds even imitate other birds - starlings can do it. I was detecting regional dialect. I swear to God birds have regional dialect! Its true - its been documented. If you think about it -there's no reason why they shouldn't. I mean... well its true. Listening to these tapes at the BBC and and having all the information about where they were recorded made me notice it.

Anyway. What I didn't realise was happening was that I was whistling these tunes more and more. Well, I did realise when it was pissing a lot of people off. I was learning my own repertoire of songs - blackbird songs. Then, about a month after I'd first had my weird encounter with the female blackbird the same thing happened again. I hadn't seen her for a while. I suppose they spend a lot of time in their nest laying eggs and whatever. But there I was in my garden and she arrives and sits down. It was like deja vu. And, believe it or not, I'm sure she felt the same thing. And she whistled at me. And before I knew it I'd whistled back. It was so bizarre. I knew the songs so well. I hadn't really put faces to songs because I was in bed listening to them - or listening on tape. But I was communicating with a bird. And the most bizarre bit about it was - I understood what she was saying.

Okay, I know you think its ludicrous. I think its ludicrous! It is fucking ludicrous. You don't communicate with birds. Not unless your name's Dolittle. I know that. But it was happening to me. And it was just the start.

Okay. Of course the next question is always going to be "what did she say?". "What did we say to each other?" Well, in that first instant I didn't really have an understanding of what was going on. I was on auto pilot. I'd had these damned tunes pinging about in my head for months and didn't know what to do with them. I'd kind of forgotten the reason why I was doing it. Now I was hooked! You might have thought I had become a little obsessive before that 2nd meeting - but after it I just went fucking nuts about it!

The first thing I did was get back on the net and try to find if anyone else had had a similar experience. No they hadn't - as far as I could tell. To be honest its not the kind of question you want to broadcast if you're worried about your own credibility. But there were scientific papers being published about stuff like 'syntactic structure' in bird songs. Not especially blackbirds but enough for me to get a kick start in decoding what the tunes might be about.

I didn't see the bird again for what seemed like a few weeks. I think it was well past mid summer at this point. I was intoxicated by it all. I just wanted to interact with this little bird in a song. I told a few people what had happened but they took the piss so much I had to just let it go. I didn't blame them. I would have done exactly the same. People would come round and whistle at me, and then wait for me to know what they were saying. And it was hilarious. Not. I had to laugh, but after that I had to keep it more of a secret. Well, not a secret - but just discreet.

Right. So the next thing was that I was studying 'the formation of intellect'. I was studying 'information transmission'. I was talking to people about code, encryption and decoding. I was just driving on and on with it. I'd downloaded basic audio-composing software from the net and was manipulating songs on my computer in an attempt to deconstruct them. Equate some kind of meaning to them. Luckily August is a quiet month for me work-wise - because at this stage, looking back, I was actually doing nothing else.

Then I made the breakthrough. I'd been messing about with some unencrypting software. Just feeding audio song samples through - when I noticed a pattern coming out. It didn't really take much notice at first, but by twiddling about with the software settings I began to get some quite defined results. What I was seeing was grammar. Blackbird grammar. It was just phenomenal. Like the people who cracked the enigma code must have felt (although that code was encrypted millions of times over so they probably felt better). So now. Well, any serious linguist will tell you, that once you have identified the grammatical structure of a language - it's reasonably straightforward to translate using algorithms. You're not going to get sentences or even specific words - but there are shared roots to information transmission. In fact, people have known, sort of, what birds have been singing about. We know what the danger signals are. We know what the territorial stuff is. But I had more.

Now I could equate sounds with words - vaguely. In English there are many words which mean roughly the same thing. Like 'yes', 'agree', 'affirmative'. This was the kind of level I was engaging blackbird language with. Hit and miss I suppose. What I was looking for was a shared 'reasoning process' - and, it eventually worked.

It was definitely into September when I next encountered the female blackbird. I remember having a jumper on. I'd been practicing the songs and fine-tuning my delivery. I think female blackbirds can lay several lots of eggs in one summer - so maybe that was why she only appeared every so often. I don't know. But, just when I least expected it - there she was. Sitting down in her spot on the patio. And I was ready for it. This time I began the conversation.

Un-fucking-believable. You know sometimes when life gets a bit spacey. Suddenly you can see better. Hear better. That trippy combination of fear and beauty and lightheadedness - when you feel... 'connected' or something. It was happening big style. I was on a roll. I was whistling for England, for the human race! I was having a fucking conversation with fucking bird! Even as I was doing it I thought, "this is it, I'm losing it. Someone's going to be on the phone. Men in white coats will be stepping serenely out onto the patio any minute - everyone smiling. 'Gently does it. Yeah, sure, keep whistling at the bird if you like. Its a lovely bird. What is it - a thrush?'". And I'm thinking, I wonder if this bird is as freaked out as I am. I mean, I didn't like to ask - we were getting on well.

Okay. Okay. You want to know what we were talking about. Obviously. I'm just telling it like it was - I was as weirded out as you'd expect anyone to be. So. I say, "hello". As I'm doing it I'm thinking two things. One, go with the flow. I can whistle these tunes till the cows come home and not necessarily know what they are about. Two, I've got a stack of data in my head which I'm trying to translate on the spot. "Hello again" she says. I understood that. So I'm thinking, "okay, what shall I ask?". Then she says something which I'm thinking about, "cat by nest". My mouth is hanging open and I must look like a freak. 'Cat by nest?' I whistle back kind of automatically. The words aren't registering. "Yes" she replies. Fuck me I need my notes - which are upstairs. But I daren't move. What do I say? There's a silence. Then inspiration. "Me scare cat?" I ask. She's animated, "yes". I'm slowly standing up and looking behind me towards the bush where her nest is. I don't know what I'm going to see. Right enough, on the little shed roof next to the bush - a couple of feet from the entrance to the nest - is a cat. A big one. Just sitting there waiting. I'm just stunned, blinking. Okay. So next I'm looking around on the ground and picking up this manky tennis ball that's been lying about - must have come over the back fence from kids playing. And I throw it. The cat's staring at it as it's coming over towards it. And me and the bird are staring at it. Just at the last second the cat's off, and the ball bounces off the shed roof. And the bird's off too.

And that's it. End of story. I haven't seen either of the birds again. I mean, birds come and go I suppose. Die, get killed, move. find new partners. Blackbirds don't migrate so it wasn't as though they'd left because of that. Over the following days, weeks, I kept hanging about waiting. But they'd always been unpredictable anyway. It wasn't unusual not to see them. Her. I left out bread and seeds but they were never touched. Next door has a apple tree - which is why, I suspect, they moved in to the locality in the first place - I know blackbirds are supposed to be partial to fruit.

There are other birds of course. Other blackbirds. I could try communicating with them. I know I could do it. I can hear what they are saying sometimes. Sometimes if there's nobody about I whistle to them. But they know. Know it's not a bird. They go quiet. I'm building a bird box now. Well, I've made the sketches. I'm not even sure whether blackbirds would live in a box. I'll hang it up in the spring and see what happens.

FIRST PUBLISHED IN FLUX MAGAZINE 2002