Birdsong

Birdsong

In Sebastian Faulks’s book Birdsong set in WWI, he said that war was “A huge crime against nature”. Can anyone beat that for a description? Here’s a challenge. Take one third of KwaZulu Natal, find thickets of woods, and get rid of them by shooting at them until there’s nothing left alive. No? Too much? What’s wrong? It took them only four days to get rid of Delville Wood in 1916.

For nothing. It was later decided there was no need for any side to fight for Delville Wood. Now, you know why old-timers refused to speak about the war. Apart from trauma, there was the terrible knowledge that it was not clear (other than “they just wanted to fight”) what the fight was all about, and it was even less clear that the generals knew what they were doing. It was a colossal, senseless waste of everything, not least four long years. Even undertakers lost out, because various governments couldn’t even begin to figure out the final logisitic of how to get twenty million bodies back to their homes.

Apart from those millions from all over the world who lost their lives, thousands of square miles all over the world were damaged. The Ardennes, a vast woodland, comprising the better part of Belgium, as well as large parts of France and Germany, was left bare of foliage, even stripped of branches. Many trees were uprooted by explosives, or burnt to the ground. Nearly every creature previously at home in those trees vanished, mostly vapourised. Millions of tons of lead and other poisonous munition metal were buried in the forests and grasslands.

It is unfathomable, when one realises most of our medicines come from trees and plants, what a sacrilege this was. It took more than half a century for them to recover, and recovery itself was not at a decent pace until, as one old man in Flanders put it, “they managed to get the birds back”.

One day, science will prove (his and) Jasper’s theory: that trees do not grow well without birdsong. Those growth rings in the tree trunks we cut down mark the passage of years, but they will also prove to be a vibrant record of the subtle seasonal bird songs themselves. Sound etches those rings, as it did the grooves in vinyl records!

With Covid–19 quietening the planet, scientists are finding out all sorts of things. One is that the earth’s crust, particularly sensitive to the movement of tectonic plates as well as our noisy vibrations, started to move less, allowing detectors to possibly spot smaller earthquakes and volcanic activity.. Wars remain a crime against nature, though it is good they are still noisy … can you imagine anything more scary than a silent one?

Our cities have filled with wild animals since lockdown. In some places, they show no fear of people. Mayabe it isn’t us they shied away from, but our calamity of vehicle noise and poisoned air?