Mark Cocker

The Symphony of a Turning Earth


It may seem perverse but there is a moment of unseasonal spring rain here in the Yare Valley that I relish. On these brooding late-May mornings, such as today, I often rush down to the marsh in the hope of seeing and hearing something special.


The swifts, which migrate through our area, are occasionally caught out by these low-pressure weather systems and can accumulate and appear almost to be corralled by the dark cloud which hangs heavy on every horizon. I know it is an illusion. No weather can really cage a creature that holds the whole heaven as its playground. But briefly the black-lined bowl of the Yare seems to suppress their customary cloud-scraping elan and swifts in large numbers come down to hunt at levels that mere humans inhabit.


If I am lucky they find a dense invertebrate swarm, perhaps chironomids or St Mark’s flies, mustered by the river, which glint like flakes of mica when the sun slips from the cloud. In this chiaroscuro of shadow and shining chitin the swifts come in wild, scimitar-winged hordes. I swear that at certain moments, as they flail over the grass and cow parsley, which is droop-headed with last night’s rain, the birds clip the canopy and a mist of fine spray marks the line of their going.


Suddenly, from nowhere, one will swing right by my head as if I were no more than another clod among all the gravity-bound dross, whose weight the birds abandoned for a life in air more than 40 million years ago. As they pass they scatter on us all: the dykes, the river, the standing pools of freshwater and the wider sounding-board of the marsh – as well as their human admirer, head upraised in wonder - a hot spray of African scream.


Swifts are specialist hunters of insects, the breeze-borne invertebrates that can waft through the air column and which ecologists call ‘aerial plankton’. The abundance of this fragile supply line is determined by temperature and as these insects wane and wax, so the birds go and come.


This is the proximate cause of their seasonal appearances but, in turn, they are shaped by the axial tilt of the Earth rotating around its own life-giving star. The planet leans at 23.4 degrees in its orbital journey so that the alternate poles face towards the Sun at the zenith of their hemisphere’s season of summer. Swifts join in our collective, annual 150-million-kilometre odyssey through space with a two-way passage of their own.



Yet I am minded to reflect that in exactly these places where the swifts fire down on the vegetation, I know the same spot when it is caught in a February freeze, when the cloud is also dark, but the daylight fails at five in the afternoon. Even then, I like to recall that spring already lies dormant among all the encircling quietude.


Within a fortnight, toads will crawl from stones to burp out that creaky, reeling love song. The hoverflies that halo the sallow blossoms in soft buzz by March are still in the mud at the dyke edge. And if the swallows breeding in the barns by manor farm are still 8,000 kilometres away in February, they will at least have moulted and acquired the miraculous blue, which will astonish us again when they perch to sing here in the April air.


So the sounds of the feeding swifts are not a solitary music. Think of them as part of a great evolving symphony of the turning Earth, played out on instruments that each place supplies. The American bioacoustician Bernie Krause calls this harmony of background sound the ‘biophony’: a musical collective involving all the life that is found in any one environment. And the more intact the wild community the more complete the associated orchestral performance. To this he adds what he names the ‘geophony’ - the contextual rhythms of wind or raindrops, movements of rivers and tides, the stirring of breeze among leaves and grasses.



For me there is a passage in this river-borne suite that I cherish more than almost any other. It happens now. It needs the swifts, for sure, but also bare-mud shoreline and standing freshwater where the waders, for which the Yare is so important, come to breed. There are probably a dozen such localities dotted upstream from Breydon to Wheatfen, but the one I know is by the banks of the Yare at Buckenham.


The two key soloists, both breeding birds, are redshank and lapwing. While they are not migrants in the sense of swifts, they are not present all year round. Our redshanks may breed at Buckenham, but could have passed in the previous months through the wetlands of coastal France and Portugal. Some may come from as far as the great African entrepot of wetland birds, the Banc d’Arguin in Mauritania. In this otherwise inhospitable desert-fringed expanse of tidal shoal, blasted by sandstorms and quaking in heat haze, Buckenham’s redshanks may spend a winter encircled by its tidal plenty.


By late spring on these humid May mornings when the swifts are spearing down the riverbank, there are common redshanks here performing a ritual song flight. In display a bird circles in repeat stiff-winged sorties, issuing a plaintive wheelie-wheelie-wheelie note that partakes of the landscape’s wider sense of clouded softness. In its relaxed moments a male can seem, if not a virtuoso, then at least a pleasing accompanist.


However, the bird’s old country name, the ‘warden’ – or even the ‘watchdog of the marsh’ - captures a redshank’s ability to act as its anxiety-filled alarm system. The bird thus troubled – and even passing cows can trigger it - produces an insistent teeu, teeu, teeu alarm note that can go on with metronomic regularity for minutes and seemingly hours. I suspect it can repel intruders if only by the power of its irritation.



Like the last species, the lapwings at Buckenham are similar in their semi-migratory status. There are flocks of them here in winter, but these thousands may have arrived from Scandinavia or Russia. The birds actually breeding at Buckenham may have spent their colder months on the Spanish plains of Extremadura, listening to the tinkling bells of Merino sheep. Or perhaps they have flown no further than Cornwall and Ireland.


In a sense the redshank’s neurotic monosyllable could not be less like the ecstatic song-flight of breeding lapwings. Yet there is in both these Yare waders a note of playfulness that somehow seems redolent of childhood and filled with a kind of innocence. In lapwings the element of humour is there in the male’s ridiculous crest, the craziness of his looping flight, which is accompanied by a weird whud-whud-whud throb from the butterfly-beating wings. Both the blazing black-and-white rhyme of his display and the heart-piercing joy of his song are filled with a sense of emotional climax. Yet, for all their serious depth I cannot help but detect also a dog’s plastic squeaking play-bone, wheezing in and out of tune as the animal chews.


Behind and around them there are also the frenetic freeform bee-bop of singing sedge warblers, or the plodding four-note dirge of reed buntings. Beyond again, remember the wider symphony of silence: the pinprick foot fall of nervous deer, a tail-sweeping progress from a vixen hunting. In the dykes there is the microscopic music of water moving fractionally where the reeds judder. Below the surface, if the light is right, you will catch the big butterfly caudal fin of a pike swaying as he courts his mate. And around everything, shining like a final glaze, is the sight and sound of the swifts.


This is the Yare, this is England, but we should recall that here is a community that does not obey or recognise boundaries. The animals are of every country. If we could name the places that they have crossed to congregate we would have a found poem on the strangeness and exoticism that is in those places but here too. Angola, Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, Burundi, Malawi, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Libya, Senegal, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Russia. Since they are not creatures of land but of air, the swifts best embody the idea that the Earth is one place, both here at Buckenham and at the Banq d’Arguin. Are we not all party to a single music: the symphony of a turning Earth?