With Chorlton Ees Nature Reserve visible from the upstairs bedroom window of their semi-detached house, Mike and Susan Prosser are accustomed to waking up to the sound of the dawn chorus.
This year, however, the birds have been serenading this retired couple (and the other residents of this sleepy suburb of Manchester) with a song that’s far more familiar than the usual bitter-sweet symphony of whistles, tweets and cheeps: a rather shrill, but unmistakable rendition of a certain song by a rather popular local band.
"Once spring arrives, we tend to leave the bedroom window ajar overnight – it’s lovely to hear the birds singing the sun up,” explains Sue. “We didn’t twig it at first, although I did notice I kept humming Oasis songs to myself while making breakfast. I just assumed I’d heard them played on Radio2.
"Then, one morning a couple of weeks ago, Mike elbowed me and said: ‘Are those birds bloody whistling Wonderwall?’ I told him not to be stupid, but then I listened hard, and, well… it really did sound like the opening bars of the song.”
“We didn’t twig it at first, although I did notice I kept humming Oasis songs to myself while making breakfast."
Mike told this story to a table of friends and neighbours at the pub quiz that evening. “A couple just laughed at me,” he recounts. "But Steph, from three doors down, said she’d heard it too. And a week later the whole lot them agreed.”
One neighbour, Phil Edmington, is a keen bird-watcher, and although initially skeptical, eventually he couldn’t argue with the aural evidence. Having identified the avian cover artists as starlings, he reached out to a local branch of the RSPB, who were rather dismissive at first.
However, when multiple reports of the phenomenon started coming in from other streets and surrounding suburbs, they began taking it a bit more seriously, and that’s when Dr Daniel Bridges from the Department of Anthropology at Northside University in Manchester got involved.
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Can birds really mimic humans?
Dr Bridge’s faculty have done extensive research into the relationship between human activity and bird song in the past, but even they had never heard anything quite like what they recorded in the trees around Chorlton.
The ability of various species of bird to mimic human sounds is well documented, with members of the corvid family (including various crows, magpies, rooks, ravens and jays) being especially renowned for their parrot-like vocal prowess.
Some, such as this community minded pied crow caught on camera in the Yorkshire town of Knaresborough, asking after people’s health, have even mastered local accents and dialects.
And, unusual though it might sound, starlings doing Stars In Their Eyes is not completely without historic precedent either: the composer Mozart had a pet starling that would famously sing part of his Piano Concerto in G Major.
"But typically this sort of thing is seen in animals that have spent a considerable amount of time in very close quarters with people, usually as pets,” explains a visibly excited Dr Bridge. “It’s extremely rare to observe such behaviour in wild birds. And I’ve never heard of an entire flock singing a pop song.”
An iridescently colourful bird when observed close up, starlings are better known for their extraordinarily elegant group dances than raucous sing-songs; the mesmerising sight of a murmuration of starlings creating fluid shapes in the sky as they look for roosting spots at sunset is truly wondrous.
"I’ve never heard of an entire flock singing a pop song.”
The experts’ best guess is that the birds – which spend lots of time in Manchester city centre during the day, opportunistically feasting on food scraps left behind by office workers, shoppers and day trippers – have picked up the tune almost by osmosis, because it is played relentlessly by the city’s buskers.
The majority of Britain’s starlings are resident all year, but some do migrate to northern Europe during the warmer months, raising concerns among some Scandinavians that they might be in for a noisy influx of airborne pop anthem-singing tourists this summer.
However, Dr Bridge thinks it will be a passing phase. “Pretty soon most of the starlings will be as bored of Wonderwall as Liam and Noel are,” he says. "And then they’ll start squabbling amongst themselves and go their separate ways.”
Back on Belwood Rise in Chorlton, many residents are now quite blasé about the Wonderwall wake-up call. “Funny thing is, Mike doesn’t even like Oasis,” grins Sue. “He’s always preferred the Stone Roses. I had to tell him off for shouting out the window at 7am the other morning – he was only asking the starlings if they did requests!”
Disclaimer: this is an April Fools' Day article. It is not factual and the people and institutions quoted in it are not real.
Main image: starling. Credit: Getty
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