song of stone

Last week a brilliant young naturalist found one of the few wood warblers to be recorded in our area. I wrote a Guardian diary for 7 July. However I thought you might like to hear what that bird sounded like, so here are 30 seconds of its extraordinary song.

This is an old Guardian piece from Wales written in 2015 but updated and adapted to reflect current changes.

What a world it must have been! In their book on Britain’s prehistoric bird populations the late Derek Yalden and Umberto Alberella speculated that our island’s first forest blanket after the end of the last ice age held 16 million wood warblers every spring. Now there are fewer than 10,500 and in the 31 years since 1995 they declined nationally by 82%.

These woods are one of their last strongholds and it emphasises how the creature’s world is always in green: either the emerald of rainforest where they spend our winter or, as it is here, the astonishing chromatic patchwork of lichen, fern, moss, holly and fresh-licked leaves of beech and oak. The steep-sided place was so immersed in green that at times it felt as if we were under water. The warbler sealed the impression because as it sang it flew in short slow-wafted flurries from tree to tree. In each momentary shift the wings were rowing so deeply through tidal pools of sunlight that they looked like fins and the displaying birds like fish.

If the visual impact was aquatic then the music was stone. Wood warblers grind and quarry out their notes from some mysterious Pleistocene hoard and – with head back and wings quivering ­- spray them as flakes of sound in an ecstatic downward trill. The tempo builds steadily. At first the lapidary notes are granular and individual, then they blur to the human ear and as they accelerate they ignite like a match-lit burst of light in that green place.

This song both seems like light and in truth it is made from light. Think this: the light in the red spectrum is swallowed by all the chloroplasts that make Tan-y-Bwlch so green, then the leaf becomes moth larva and the caterpillar turns to muscle and surplus energy in a bird. Wood warbler and wood and song are all just light. We too come from light. In this spot and at that moment we all felt it. How strange to think that this tiny bird comes out of Africa to make these woods so completely Welsh. What a world we still own now!