The Unexpected Joy of Traffic Jams: Birdsong Bliss

The curse of all who have somewhere to be and have left it just a little too late. We have all suffered in the queue, but it turns out I have found one positive.

I am sitting in my office as I type this short article. It’s a nice office on the ground floor of my home, with a dual aspect looking out onto the garden. I was actually sitting at the desk writing about another topic, but I managed to get myself bogged down in my own rhetoric, so paused for some moments to think. Whilst thinking I found myself entertained by the birdsong coming from both sides of the garden outside. I can hear the ever-present Blackbird, Wood Pigeon, Song Thrush and a Redstart. There are a few more, but my Young Ornithologist's Badge is very old and due for renewal. I have spent many hours sitting at my desk, often completing mind-numbing paperwork, so I am prone to the occasional bit of procrastination, but I’m struggling to think of how long it has been since I could hear such clear songs and calls from the local songbird population. No, wait. I do remember how long it has been, during the lockdown caused by the government reaction to COVID-19. The reason that I could hear the birds so clearly then was the vastly reduced volume of vehicular traffic on the roads. My home is rural and as some of my family allege: “In the middle of bloody nowhere”, but this is not true at all. I live five miles or so from a town and there is a very busy A road 600 metres away, across three fields to the south of me. But it is that very A road, which does create a huge amount of noise pollution, only really noticed by me way back in the spring of 2020. Back then I was so astounded by my discovery of the underlying, natural, soundscape that I honestly believed for a while that I may have discovered a bird species that was unknown to man – it was a Song Thrush (let’s skip over that).

Wondering what had suddenly caused this lack of background white noise, and realising that I needed to move myself before I became part of the furniture, I decided to take a stroll across the aforementioned fields and investigate. Temporary roadworks. Hmm.

I am no lover of road works and these look to be of a particularly annoying sort, you know the ones where there is a line of cones stretching for a quarter of a mile of coned off road with no work visibly taking place. They are surely going to cause me some form of delay during the time that they are in place. Trudging back to the house, my nosiness gloomily satisfied I am still listening to the work of the songbirds, I can also hear the cheeping from the pheasant rearing pens; there is an unintended positive to the line of traffic sitting there waiting – the dull idle of the engines is so much less intrusive than the higher speed rumble and whine of tyres whipping along the tarmac. To those of us bordering the queues we have a small space of time in which to enjoy the sounds of Mother Nature going about her business. I suppose that it is just a shame that all of those stationary vehicles are reputedly belching out enough pollution to have Mother Nature reaching for her COVID face mask.