Do Birds Sing?

I live in Angus on the east coast of Scotland, above the big fjords of the Forth and Tay, just where the land starts to lean out into the North Sea. Around 6200 BC, a massive failure of the Norwegian continental shelf caused a giant tsunami which swept south and west for hundreds of miles, reaching our coastline in a matter of hours, swamping estuaries and river valleys and barging far inland. As it seeped back, in what had been the soft, grassy bed of a slowing burn, it left a wide scooped-out bowl. The Montrose Basin is now a vast, almost entirely enclosed expanse of slab and mudflat. Twice a day when the tide comes in, it is a shallow, temporary sea.

Needless to say it bristles with birdlife: all migrant species of the North Atlantic are present, sometimes en masse. Each October around 100,000 pinkfoot geese make landfall here as they head south from Iceland and the Faroes. Their call, clear amid the rattling of thousands of wings, is a streaming ‘ink-ink’ – giving rise maybe to their local name: kwink. There is a very satisfying glimpse here of the moment that the bird was named; of someone trying to fit their mouth to what they heard in their landscape, tuning consonants and vowels until they arrived at a deft, self-explanatory sound-image of that thing over there, that creature whose arrival alters the soundscape so significantly, and leaves with such clamour.

Such words have currency. Bird lists for countries round the North Sea rim show a similar attention to sound ...