Dusk

I close the back door on the boiling pots and their chattering lids, the mewling cats, and the drone of kids TV. One small step into the cool evening air and I’m hit. Dusk has come and is hurtling past me, birdsong spraying from its tyres. I’m drenched in a thousand birds singing. Notes fall like hail. It rains down on my glass ears. Song pools at my feet. I’m drowning.

We lived in the city for fifteen years before we came here. I longed for soft ground underfoot and a night sky I could actually see—less concrete, more stars. I wanted the open space and quiet of my childhood. We found that here, in this rural valley, but where were all the native birds? In Wellington we lived close to Zealandia, the wildlife sanctuary, and the surrounding suburbs were frequented by kereru and tui. I could watch them all day from my kitchen window. 

When we moved here, I didn’t see a single tui for months. But there was an abundance of common garden birds—blackbird, thrush, finch and sparrow. It took time to adjust and appreciate the diversity. I began to notice silvereye, fantails, grey warblers and starlings nesting and roosting in our trees. Eastern rosellas swell in numbers in the warmer months. In our first year they stripped the pear tree of its fruit before I even knew we had one. Pukeko pick their way across paddocks, through our garden, and out the other side.  Hawks wheel overhead year round, and skirt our hedges, hunting. In spring magpies go on the offensive, chasing the hawks away from their tree-top nests. 

Then there are the seasonal visitors—bellbirds, the shining cuckoo, and a pair of kingfishers that nest in the bank of the creek. In spring, quails arrive. The first chicks mature and breed again before the end of summer, swelling the flock to a dozen or more. A pair of mallard ducks treat the garden as home, pulling their train of yellow ducklings. Blue heron fly over and rest on the thin branches at the top of the macrocarpa trees. Seagulls fly up and down the road as if it is a river, and nothing beats lying in bed at night listening to the morepork’s lonely call.

Over the eight years we’ve been here the number of tui has increased. I used to see only one, occasionally, but now I can see or hear three or four at a time. A pair of kereru also now pass through regularly. I don’t remember seeing any in our first couple of years. 

My life here includes scouring the wind-blown garden for fallen nestlings, cold eggs and broken shells. I collect feathers, nests and skeletons of from every corner of the property, and I’ve learned to (mostly) distinguish the call of one bird from another. My children and I have built nest boxes and feeders, watched birds through binoculars and photographed them through the telescope. 

I’d heard snatches of dawn chorus, when awake in the early hours with newborn babies, or woken mid-spring to the riotous noise. I am an enthusiastic, but inexperienced, birdwatcher. Maybe I’m not even that—bird lover might be a better description. Still, I had never heard the dusk chorus. I did not even know it was a thing. 

It was seven years after we moved here that I first heard it in any meaningful way. When we arrived our oldest child was two, I was pregnant with our second, and we had our third child shortly after that. All that time, all those evenings—thousands if I dare add them up—the dusk chorus had been going on and I’d never heard it. Those twilight hours were for cooking, feeding, bathing, and putting children to bed. Hearing the dusk chorus that first time was like discovering Santa had been walking past the kitchen window while you peeled the carrots and set out the jug of beer. 

I was dazzled by the chorus that night of clanging pots and pans. I wanted more. In the city, to encourage the birds, we would put out seeds and nectar feeders, and plant harakeke flax and kowhai trees. Here I don’t do anything—the show is free and on time every night if you can make it. For months I ventured outside, night after night. Our evening routine was habit as much as anything so I reshaped our day, pushing dinner later or pulling it forward, creating windows of time to listen. I heard the start, the middle and the end, all in patches. I listened from the deck and I walked the garden, stopping in different places and turning my ill-equipped ears in every direction. I listened though the last of winter, spring, and on into the summer.

There’s a reason the chorus is so good here. We are surrounded on all sides by paddocks, many of which have shelterbelts. In many ways this valley resembles the English countryside and is a perfect habitat for songbirds—plenty to eat, places to roost, and lots of territory to claim. Each tree is an apartment building; each row of trees an avenue, full of life. It’s a city of birds. Our own property is ringed with hedges and punctuated with stands of tall trees. A bowl of lawn in the centre turns the garden into an amphitheatre.

Longer daylight hours signal the start of breeding season. In spring, there are more birds with more to say, and more at stake. The chorus lengthens and deepens. Listening each evening feels like being serenaded; as if it were all just for me. It isn’t, of course. It is more prosaic than that. The male bird sings to claim his territory. He proves his strength and brain power by the length, intricacy or variety of his song. He sings to attract a mate, and to intimidate would-be challengers. He sings to survive and to procreate. He sings because his genes urge him, sing! I know it and it makes no difference. My ears hear the notes, my brain interprets it as music, but something deeper in me clocks it as wonder. Isn’t a symphony more than instruments synchronously played? Isn’t an instrument more than the sum of its parts? A violin more than maple or birch, ebony and sheepgut strings? Anything can be stripped back to itself, to the mechanical or the scientific, to its finest indivisible grain, but you can’t strip away wonder. A territorial call belted out by a male bird shouldn’t make sense to anyone but the bird for whom it is sung, yet I am awed. I don’t care that he isn’t singing for me.

I invited my husband outside one Saturday evening. The conditions were perfect—darkening, chilly, and still—and the birds were mid-chorus. All the pieces that were in place that first night were here again. It was a riot. Each hedged chamber was sending up song, mingling in the air above our head.  The back of my neck prickled. I turned to look at him and he nodded, the way I nod when he is recounting his latest sports win—pleased for him, but unaffected. Possibly a little bored. No amount of explaining what we were listening to could bridge the gap between his experience and mine. 

I wanted to know more. I learned that a wren can sing at a rate of 740 notes per minute. A yellowhammer may sing its song up to 3000 times in a day. The tuis in my garden sound different to the ones at my parents’ house because they have dialects; bird song with accents. Song can elicit emotions in a bird similar to what we experience when we listen to music. On hearing the male bird’s song, the female experiences pleasure. Male birds in the vicinity hear it as discordant and unpleasant, producing an amygdala response.

Some birds inherit their calls. It arrives in much the same way as feathers and flight—without effort. Others birds learn their song the same way we learn to speak—by listening and babbling, practicing until they can sing as clearly and eloquently as the birds that raised them. A young bird deprived of the chance to listen to song would spend its life uttering a stunted, bumbled version of what it might have sung.

 Singing is costly. It takes almost as much energy as flying, which is one reason birds sing in the low light of dusk and dawn— it keeps them hidden from predators. But it is the lower air temperatures and less active air currents that allow sound to travel further that make it the best time to sing. In clear weather, sound can travel twenty times better than during the day. There is also less background noise; the insects are quiet and so are the humans. 

If the purpose of song is to claim territory and attract a mate, then projecting your song is everything. For clarity and volume they sing from perches, from trees and buildings. Each bird is a pilgrim on a hilltop, calling on high. They’re sending smoke signals, praying clear air will carry their message home. Each song is tried and tested, laying down challenge, laying claim, pleading, hopeful, defiant. They are love songs and war cries. They carve up this place in ways we can’t imagine. Tidy fences, pegged boundaries, claims to land we can’t own mean nothing to the birds. They stake their kingdoms—these three trees here are mine! South to the creek, across to the pear tree, excluding the quince, mine!—and all of it done by song.

They broadcast hoping to be heard and I quiet my mind so I can catch it. I want to hear each separate song; I want the whole damn choir. I slacken the ties, unclip the day, shutter my mind to every clamouring thing, and listen. When I listen I am loosed in the world, belonging to nothing and wanting no-one; one warm body in a cooling day.

There is a silence before the chorus starts. The clear sky is slick ice; thin, no longer blue. The world looks drained and void, a hollow pail waiting for the pour of night. The pines are silhouettes. They are shadow puppet trees, a backdrop in a pantomime show. The fading light has sheared the garden to a flat black, as if the sun dragged matter with it. There is no depth here, nothing to rest the eye on, nothing to soak up the sound. It is a shell in which birdsong will rattle.  

It starts each night with the tui. Singing from the taller cypress, gingko, and macrocarpa, they circle the garden from tree to tree, playing the rim of a singing bowl. Their low notes, designed to fly like arrows through our dense native bush, carry clear through the garden and straight through me. They gargle, click, bebop and purr. 

Blackbird, thrush, and finch join in; sparrows sing background notes. There are long trills, sweet notes, harsh calls, everything is a clamour, noise from every quarter. Song carries from adjacent paddocks, filtered and sieved by the trees. I could map it all by sound, echo-locate, trace angles of notes and chart its elevations. Macrocarpa mountains and shelter belt cliffs, rockface hedges channelling a river, directing birdsong wave after wave, each new note settling and changing the land. I could map my way out or drown here. The sky might fall.

Birds sing flying. A blackbird speeds by in a bold cut and a rough burst of song. There is clamour in a tree, a boisterous meet. It sounds like greetings and thanks, every last measure of energy spent, every last second of daylight wrung out in song. They are children, holding nothing back. 

Then it stops. A great hush. The day has cried itself to sleep; from riot to silence. A blanket is pulled up over the day and every last bird put to bed. The silence in this new dark is soft, each sharp song felted into place. There is texture here. The trees fill out again and sigh. The tail of the chorus carries and feathers the air.  

The sky is nearing the blue of van Gogh’s night. I’m alone with the crescent moon, and Venus flashing its borrowed light.  The sky is otherwise empty; daisies on the lawn glow like stars. Two ducks flap and quack overhead, and a lone pukeko calls from down by the river. Walking back to the house in the dark I see my life framed and cast in yellow light. Each window is a small scene. My children are characters in a picture book. Someone has caught them and preserved them in amber for me. I stand and watch a while, wondering who these marvellous creatures are.

I do this again and again, immersing myself in this chaos, as if to weaken my mind’s resolve. I want to hear what seems discordant and tune my ear beyond it. I want to walk back into the house at dusk and find music in the clanging of lids, the soft roil of the running bath, and in the children’s tears as they let go of the day, releasing what they need to in order to sleep. This is a last gasp of day; one more thing I do to make the day count. I drink song.

Before we had electric lights, gas, candles; before we burned whale, we lay on floors in bivouacs and caves. We looked up through leaves and stared at stars. We listened to the birds explode and litter the ground with song. We fell asleep to the crackle in the air.

Photo courtesy of Lynne Jamneck