I want to make the world a better place, but what’s there to do after you’ve joined Greenpeace and Barnardo’s, recycled your tins and signed up for an Amnesty International credit card? Give a beggar a fiver and he will shout “Ha! I’m going to spend it on heroin!” I didn’t think he was going to save up for the deposit on a house.
But I didn’t want to do saving-the-world admin like cash donations and one-off road jockeying. I wanted to do something big - on the scale of Dorothy landing her house on the Wicked Witch of the West, but with less wind.
Then I remembered a resolution I’d made a long time ago: to teach the birds to sing again. A few years back, The Sunday Times reported how traffic noise has trashed the dawn chorus.
Birdsong is regional, with local hit singles passed from bird to bird during dawn jam sessions. These days, urban areas are so loud the birds can’t hear each other sing. The only sounds birds are picking up are from car alarms, mobile phones and microwave ovens, which is why city dawn choruses sound like a couple of chickens doing a karaoke version of Radioactivity by Kraftwerk.
That seemed like something I could sort out. I set up the stereo on the windowsill, to teach doh-ray-mes to the birds and the bees. More callow instructors would have played them the first recording of birdsong they could get their hands on - in this case, Morning Song Bird, the only birdsong album on amazon.co.uk. But I noticed that there was a hummingbird on the cover and, mindful of the dangers of imposing one culture on another, I put in an order at HMV for British Bird Songs of the Trees and Hedges. Now, every morning, I drape my stereo with bacon rinds and try to teach the birds their heritage.
Sometimes I get the fear, though, that the birds had just naturally moved on to a more dance-based, r’n‘b sound, and I’m trying to get them into the bird equivalent of Vera Lynn.
