A few years ago there was an internet campaign to save a radio station that broadcasts nothing but birdsong. It is what they call “the whistling call of the wild” as the sound of British birds from a country garden is played on a continuous loop. They are resisting the possibility of a commercial programme taking over and replacing it. Apparently over half a million listeners have tuned into this programme with an ever increasing audience choosing to wake each morning to this soothing sound. Such is the demand the company have had to produce better sound by upgrading the recording.
These listeners have stumbled across Birdsong as they were searching on their digital radio stations. It starts at 6:00 a.m and closes at midnight and is a 20 minute-long recording of the birds singing in chorus. Those birds included are the Buzzard, Blackbird, Robin, Tawny Owl, Curlew, Herring Gull, Skylark and Nightingale. Glyn Jones, Operating Director of DigitalOne, has said “that most of the 159,000 weekly audiences from One Word (the programme Birdsong replaced) have now listened to it, and because it has caught the public’s imagination, at least another 340,000 have come on board as well.”
The recording was made by Quentin Howard, chairman of DigitalOne in his Wiltshire garden in 1991 as the sound effects of an amateur production of a dramatics play. He did not realise when he did it that the sound from the edge of Salisbury Plain would become so famous. Its possible termination is because it has to run uninterrupted, and therefore there can be no commercial breaks, so its life is potentially doomed for money rather than Birdsong talks, not whistles!
It seems that certain bird sounds evoke memories of our childhood, and a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said: “we actually have birdsong as our telephone hold music and it is not uncommon for people to ask to listen to it a while longer.” Swifts and Nightingales remind people of spring, Sea Gulls of their holidays; and the Blackbirds of the sunset.
My sudden awareness of bird song was after I had inserted some hearing aids. I had been to hospital because my hearing was clearly defective. I was asked to insert my head into a three-sided cover and, when I heard some sort of sound, to tap the outside of the cover to indicate to the doctor that I was hearing something. After some time I felt a tap on my shoulder and I withdrew my head to face an earnest young nurse who said “Do you understand Mr. Carr what you have been asked to do” “yes,” I replied “but as yet I have heard nothing” She,
slightly embarrassed, realised that my hearing was so bad they had to up the volume. Eventually my hand started tapping and the test was soon finished.
Two hearing aides were prescribed and eventually I was able to use them, but not for long. It seemed that my life on building sites had destroyed my ability to hear the higher regions, not uncommon in such cases, so the hearing aides were to replace this deficiency.
I sat at a restaurant table in a hotel and put my hearing aides in, and suddenly there were the birds, I had forgotten how sweet they sounded. However, the down side was the colossal noise of knives and forks on timber tables, it was horrendous and distracting. And, as I sat in my car listening to the engine it sounded like a sooped-up racing car, as the engine emitted its working noise. I took them out, for I couldn’t hear Patricia speak, only the sound of the car.
I have not worn them very often since then, I prefer the quietness, but it reminded me of the text “The time [or the sound] of the singing of the birds is come.” (SOS 2:12). It was a herald of spring; the love language of the dusky maiden in love with the king. Lovers can hear all sorts of innocuous sounds that only they can hear and understand.
When they said to me I had lost my ability to hear the ‘higher regions’ I thought that may be so in the physical but not in the spiritual realm, I can hear God quite well. He speaks to our heart not our ears, lest they be the ears of the heart. However I did hear God speak once, and only once, I was pushing my lawnmower round the side of my bungalow in Solihull, where I lived, when he jumped out of the bushes and quite distinctly said “Give it up.” He meant my bungalow and ancillary comforts and go to London, I did; the rest is history and possibly the future for HICC.
If I had a digital radio I would no doubt tune in to Birdsong, but it would be so loud my wife could hear it in the bedroom from my study and I don’t think she would welcome that kind of noise in her sleep. So, I tune in to God and listen to what he is saying, I am sure the birds are nice but he is better.
