The soothing song of a grey butcher bird serenaded the Hobart bushcare community as members gathered last month for their annual year-end barbeque.
Even in celebration with beers and wood-fired pizzas, a couple of hundred bushcare volunteers could not escape the call of the bush which sees them contribute, collectively, many hours of hard but enjoyable toil each year to help maintain our city’s wildlife wonders.
The song of the butcherbird provided a fitting endorsement of the bushcare commitment – together with a rousing speech by the deputy mayor Helen Burnett – but it also carried perhaps a greater, more general significance.
The very act of a bird singing has been found in a recent research project to underscore the well-established notion that access to green and blue spaces is strongly associated with better physical and mental health.
Much has been written already in these Covid times about the large number of city and suburban folk who developed an interest in wildlife in their gardens – especially birds – at the height of the travel restrictions. It has now been established in Britain that this new-found appreciation of birds has not been restricted to the sight of them perched and flitting across gardens. Those in lockdown also paid attention to birdsong partly because it became louder and clearer when traffic vanished from roads and aircraft from the skies.
With less human-made noise, the complexity and diversity of birdsong – all those whistles, chirrups, cackles and cries along with melodies – became more apparent.
The British Natural History Museum conducted a survey of nature lovers at the start of the pandemic and later said 73 per cent of respondents reported hearing louder birdsong, with many commenting it had “comforted and calmed them at a time of crisis”.
The museum cited work by Dr Eleanor Ratcliffe, a lecturer in environmental psychology at the University of Surrey, who has found in her research that merely hearing bird sounds creates the same relaxing experience as a nature walk.
Researchers from King’s College London also published a study in October which found seeing or hearing birds was associated with an improvement in mental wellbeing that could last all day.
Strikingly, this improvement was also evident in people with a diagnosis of depression. The researchers suggested that ‘‘bird therapy’’ could be prescribed to people with depression who resisted lifestyle therapies such as exercise.
Andrea Mechelli, professor of early intervention in mental health at King’s said: “It’s incredibly challenging to motivate someone with depression to exercise. Whereas contact with bird life is something that, perhaps, is feasible.”
Or going further, birds could be a lure to get people out of their homes to enjoy nature, with birdsong the clarion call.
In Australia we have more than our fair share of birds to provide the background music to our daily lives, the butcherbird with its musical song among them.