A nightingale sang in W5

Piti­ful lack of con­cen­tra­tion today, mostly caused by nobody choos­ing to return my incred­ibly import­ant phone calls. Sod you, then. Sod you all. I’m going to talk about birds instead.

Yes, birds. You heard.

It’s always sur­prised me that in the middle of this bust­ling met­ro­polis, it is actu­ally pos­sible to hear bird­song — bird­song of the sort I remem­ber from my idyllic rural child­hood (cue soft-edged shot of me sit­ting in a field chew­ing on a blade of straw. Sniff, sigh, etc). It’s fairly amaz­ing, if you think about it. In this heav­ily pol­luted city, you’d think the only noise most birds would man­age would be the del­ic­ate sound of chok­ing as they keel over from car­bon monox­ide poisoning.

This morn­ing, I spent about an hour listen­ing to the beau­ti­ful dawn chorus, as the birds awoke and greeted another sun­rise with their mel­li­flu­ous songs … oh, it’s no good, I can’t lie to you. It was the fact that the dawn chorus was so bloody loud that woke me up in the first place. Instead of think­ing how sub­lime it soun­ded, I actu­ally wanted to arm myself with a rifle and go out and shoot each of the little bas­tards from the branches on which they were perched. Indi­vidu­ally. With extreme malice. Try singing with a bit of lead in your beak, you feath­ery little f — f — f … well, you get what I mean, anyway.

Me? Tired and irrit­able? Never!

How­ever, on morn­ings when they’re not drag­ging me from my slum­ber, I have been known to lie in bed listen­ing to the day­break. Via this intens­ive but bleary-eyed study, I’ve noticed with alarm that the warb­ling and chir­rup­ing of some birds increas­ingly resembles the ring tones of some mobile phones.

Think about that for a moment. Birds and mobile phones. It’s not such a crazy idea. Ima­gine you’re a bird — pos­sibly, yes, a par­tic­u­larly stu­pid bird — but a bird non­ethe­less. You hear a high-pitched and insist­ent beep­ing tone, and under­stand­ably you think it’s another of your kind.

So some of our feath­ery friends out there are a little con­fused? Big deal, I hear you say. But wait … what about if some of these birds inter­pret these appeal­ing elec­tronic noises as being mat­ing calls. This brings a whole new dimen­sion to the mat­ter. The awful truth slowly dawns that our mod­ern tech­no­logy could well be screw­ing up (if you’ll par­don the unin­ten­tional pun) some birds’ sex lives. Right now, they are perched on branches pos­sibly only a few feet from your win­dow, and they are keep­ing up a run­ning con­ver­sa­tion with a passing Nokia. A bluetit may have fallen head over heels in love with an Eric­sson; a chaffinch is won­der­ing if tonight’s going to be the night he makes the beast with two backs with a Sam­sung. Their feath­ers are tingling with excite­ment and pure animal lust as they think, “She/he sounds rather sexy. I reckon I’m in ‘ere!”

So remem­ber, if you care about the birds, change your mobile’s ring tone to some­thing that won’t con­fuse the local spar­rows. The future of nature itself depends upon it. Possibly.