May is always a busy month for me, as it is birdsong season. Every year since I moved back to the UK fifteen years ago, I have led birdsong walks and workshops. And every year I have told participants that May is absolutely the wrong time of year to learn birdsong.
Correction: May is a fabulous time of year to learn birdsong. But not to begin learning. Time and again I’ve seen people melt down on a May morning, as they struggle to distinguish the many songsters in the chorus. How can you expect to recognise the subtly different tones of blackcaps and garden warblers if you can’t pick up the strident whirring of a wren, the cheery chiming of a great tit?
In the old joke, the traveller asking for directions is told, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have started from here.’ In the same way, every year in May I tell workshop participants that they should have started learning birdsong in January.