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Reviewed: Tweet of the Day on Radio 4

Morning has spoken.

By Antonia Quirke

Tweet of the Day
Radio 4

A new year-long series started this week – every day (5.58am), early risers heard the call of a different species of bird and a brief description of its quirks. Each programme lasts just 90 seconds, David Attenborough presents this month, and others will pass the baton until next spring. Of the 596 species on the official British bird list, 286 are considered rare and the BBC’s natural history unit has gone through thousands of old bird recordings and made some new ones, starting with the spring song of the male cuckoo.

Just enough of the cuckoo’s call was broadcast to cast a spell (immense, immediate) and then precisely the right amount of information about its migration patterns or habits or history given in between each little stretch of the song itself – it used to be believed that the cuckoo turned into a sparrowhawk in winter. The minute and a half was perfectly balanced. Sound and silence, words and song, infinitely poetic: pure radio.

Simon Armitage, in his introduction to his 1999 collection of very short poems, writes about poetry being radiophonic. “Poetry, like radio, enjoys the open space that surrounds it, and invites the imagination to fill that space. On the radio that space is silence and the absence of any visual stimulation; in poetry that space is empty white paper surrounding the text.” He is right. Not even fleetingly did you miss a visual image of the cuckoo even when Attenborough almost taunted us with Wordsworth on how hard they can be to spot with the eye: “Shall I call thee bird/Or but a wondering voice?” The sound was quite enough. Presence in its most concentrated form.

Later in the week the wood warbler’s song was described as a “spinning coin on a marble slab” and swifts as “these screeching gangs of tearaways” – lovely writing. The only drawback to these tiny, shell-perfect meditations is that no larger point is ever drawn, and if there is one to be made about our primal fondness for birdsong it might simply be that if the birds are singing then the world is not yet, not quite, defunct.

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Or as Ted Hughes put it when writing about Swifts returning to his garden: “They’ve made it again/Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s/Still waking refreshed, our summer’s/Still all to come.”

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