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This excerpt is the 10th chapter of The Birds Our Teachers: Biblical Lessons from a Lifelong Bird Watcher by John Stott.

Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourestthy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art!
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to a Skylark, 1819)

Birds and humans have obvious characteristics which distinguish them from one another. Birds can fly; humans cannot.

Humans can make moral choices; birds cannot. Yet they have at least one thing in common: both sing! Both have vocal chords, even though ours is the larynx and theirs the syrinx.

Moreover, each bird species has its own distinctive song by which it can be recognised.

Two rather nondescript little greenish-yellow warblers — the Chiffchaff and the Willow Warbler — were originally thought to be the same species. They both nest in Europe and winter in Africa, and their look-alike plumage can deceive even experts.

But Gilbert White, the Hampshire parson and author of The Natural History of Selborne (1789), insisted that they must be distinct species because of their distinct songs. The former goes "chiff-chaff-chaffchiff" in a harsh, irregular and even erratic fashion, whereas the Willow Warbler utters a sweet cadence in a descending scale, in a minor key, and with a final flourish.

Only the tone-deaf could fail to appreciate the liquid bubbling trill of the curlew's spring song, the haunting yodel of the Great Northern Diver (Common Loon in North America), the resonant, explosive outburst of the wren ("Winter Wren" in North America), its tiny throat palpitating like a prima donna's, the melodious flutelike warbling of the male European Blackbird, or the Song Sparrow's varied repertoire of up to 25 little arias.

Of special mention is the so-called "dawn chorus," in which all the local breeding birds join in, heralding the sunrise. Viscount Grey, whom I have mentioned in an earlier chapter, used to escape from his parliamentary duties in London to Fallodon, his estate in northeast Northumberland. Though towards the end of his life his eyesight was failing, his hearing remained keen, and he loved the summer dawn chorus, which was at its best between three and four o'clock in the morning. "Unfortunately," he wrote, "this wonderful opening of the day occurs at an hour when civilised man is either in sleep or suffering from the want of it. In the first case he does not hear the singing; in the second he is in no mood to enjoy it; is, in fact, not worthy of it."

The Romantic poets were not slow to celebrate our principal songsters. Both John Keats and William Wordsworth followed John Milton in composing an Ode to a Nightingale, whereas Wordsworth and Shelley both wrote an Ode to a Skylark.

The Eurasian Skylark is somewhat drab in appearance, but compensates by its sensational song. Although a ground-dwelling and ground-nesting bird, its real habitat is the sky. In song flight the male ascends vertically, higher and higher, until it is almost out of sight. As it hovers, head to wind, with vigorous wing beat, its song is delivered with enormous gusto. Its high-pitched, shrill, forceful warbling is sustained for up to five minutes, with apparently no pause for breath, until it parachutes down, with a final, silent drop to the ground. Poets less well-known than Wordsworth and Shelley have also tried to capture the lark's unique combination of flight and song. I think of Mary Sorrell, who came to Christ in later life, following a stroke which deprived her of speech. It was then, when her vessel was floundering and near to sinking, that (she wrote), "I found Jesus Christ treading the blue-green waves." Here is her poem about the lark:

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November (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52