Like (I suspect) many birdwatchers, I sometimes wish I actually was a bird. Birds are just better at life. They are more colourful, more tuneful, more beautiful, than mammals. Their feathers are more versatile, their lungs more efficient, their digestion faster, their genomes more streamlined, the visual acuity superior, their eyes attuned to more colours, including ultraviolet ones.
Falcons can fly at breakneck speed, geese can soar above Everest, albatrosses can circumnavigate the Antarctic with barely a wingbeat, swifts can stay on the wing for months on end, humming birds can hover motionless at a flower. They even live longer than mammals of similar size: some albatrosses are over 73 years old.
My claim is that our mammal-centric viewpoint leaves us unimaginatively stuck in an inferior place compared with evolution’s true masterpieces, the birds. With very, very few exceptions, mammals are brown, grey or black and unpatterned. Birds are blue, green, yellow, red and everything between; they are iridescent, exquisitely camouflaged or intricately patterned; they have crests and plumes and feathery tails, with spots and stripes and flashes. They sing an almost infinitely original variety of tunes, where we mammals grunt, shriek or roar when we give tongue at all.
Birds are – to put it simply – more fun. A world without birds would be silent, colourless and grim.
This month, as the sun rises higher in the sky, near my home, there will be a continuous and overlapping dawn chorus of glorious song to which mammals (and reptiles and amphibians) will contribute not a thing.
Anthropomorphism be damned: I defy anybody not to describe the throbbing crescendo of the Curlew’s song above a Pennine moor as ‘joyous’. It’s somehow just perfect for the place, a theme tune for the landscape. As the Scottish farmer and nature writer Patrick Laurie put it in his book Native, ‘No other wild bird has that power to convey a sense of place through song. It’s a grasping bellyroll of belonging in the space between rough grass and tall skies, and you never forget it.’
The calls of Skylark, Golden Plover, Redshank, Peewit, Cuckoo and all the others that I hear every morning on the moors of Northern England are also thrilling to the human ear: excited, lively, lyrical, pleasing and just plain happy. Above all they are beautiful.
As I listen to their calls, I realise that this is odd. I last shared a common ancestor with a Curlew or a Skylark about four hundred million years ago, when that ancestor was a lumbering Devonian reptile that presumably grunted – if it called at all – in its swampy home. Can there really be a universal standard of beauty that is shared by such different beasts as me (a descendant of small, nocturnal Jurassic shrew-like creatures) and the Curlew, a long-beaked descendant of mid-size, diurnal Jurassic dinosaurs?
How can it be that the aesthetic sense of the bird today coincides partly with mine, that we both have, in Charles Darwin’s word, a similar ‘taste for the beautiful’? By contrast, the Curlew’s anxious whinnying call in June when I walk too near its chicks is not beautiful at all: just unhappy. Likewise, the Peewit, Redshank, Oystercatcher and Golden Plover also sound deeply worried – to the human ear – when they have chicks.
It’s the Black Grouse that I find most thrilling to watch as males gather at “leks” to fight, dance and mate. The Black Grouse female undoubtedly finds the black, blue, white and red of the male in full display aesthetically pleasing, and so do I. I can think of few male bird displays, or songs, that are ugly. Show somebody a film of a Peacock displaying, or an Argus Pheasant or a bird of paradise, or play them a Nightingale or a Curlew, and they will exclaim not ‘How weird’ or ‘How dull’, but ‘How lovely!’.
This is a point that puzzled Darwin. You can just about devise a theory to explain why male ornaments – and songs – became conspicuous and exaggerated, but how or why did they become so beautiful to the human eye and ear? It’s hard not to think that birds too must find them so, that the aesthetic sense is one we somehow share with Peahens and Curlews. His answer was that people and birds are both driven by generations of mate choice to evolve this love of beauty. Reproduction of the hottest is a very different process from survival of the fittest, Darwin argued.
The standard of beauty that bird song, and bird feathers, share with people would include a preference for pure notes, rather than harsh squawks or clicks, harmonies rather than disharmonies, regular, rhythmic phrasing rather than a jumble, and in the visual world, pure hues, bright luminance and elegant shapes. There may be a hint here as to why my aesthetic sense and the Curlew’s, Black Grouse’s or Peahen’s are so similar. Purity of note or hue is harder to produce, more statistically improbable and more unusual than broad-spectrum noises or broad-spectrum browns. In the natural world, bright colours and pure notes and intricate patterns do not occur by accident; they have to be created deliberately.
Yet surely we human beings only discern a tiny fraction of the complexity and the thrill in a bird’s song. Just as we must seem bizarrely oblivious and anosmic to a dog in not paying attention to scents, or blind to a Starling in not seeing ultraviolet patterns, so we must be deaf to many of the intricacies of meaning in a Curlew chorus. As the great African scientist-artist Jonathan Kingdon put it in his book Origin Africa, ‘A flock of piapiacs or a covey of crested guineafowl have vocabularies, complexities of syncopation, burdens of meaning to match a human composer’s range of composition, a sensitivity to pitch that would please Art Tatum.’
One day, while watching the display of the Black Grouse, it dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like birds do and other dinosaurs did. They have been experimenting with bright colours for a hundred million years. We mammals are, as I say, usually some shade of brown, and brown is the default colour nature adopts when it is not trying to be ‘colourful’.
Most mammals don’t even do much colour vision and those of us that do have a paltry three colour receptors, two of which (red and green) are pretty close together in wavelength terms. Birds, insects, fish – they all must think of us mammals as grim, dull, utilitarian, monochrome bores. Mantis shrimps have up to sixteen different colour receptors in their eyes and a unique ability to see circularly polarised light.
Except in a few monkeys’ faces, the smartest male mammals ever get is to grow a pair of fancy horns or develop some bold stripes or spots. Where is the bright red fur, the iridescent blue pelt, the golden yellow skin, the green striped sides, even the ultra-black back? I suppose it’s because we – our ancestors – spent the Mesozoic era being mostly nocturnal, while the dinosaur-birds ruled the day.
Only after the asteroid hit sixty-six million years ago, did we start slowly to become daylight lovers. So when we human beings wax lyrical about the beauty of a bird of paradise or a sunset, we are mere beginners, naive dullards glimpsing what the real gods of colour can do, and not appreciating it in its full glory.
Indeed, the fact that birds can see ultraviolet colours is testimony to the fact the we mammals are truly ignorant of the glories of the world around us. Perhaps as a birder my obsession with birds is rooted in a form of envy. I wish I could see like a bird and grow feathers like a bird. And perhaps I need to slough off my mammalian obsession with rhyme and reason – rather than fun and show. Mammals are prose; birds are poetry.