Fact Check: No write a poem on the book birdsong

If you’re a writer, there are a few key things to know about copyright law and the protections available to you · First, copyright protects original works of authorship, including literary works like books, essays, articles, blogs, and poetry. Generally, works that are considered “literary ...

Published collections of poetry may be registered on a single form with a single fee if all the poems are owned by the same copyright claimant · Unpublished collections of two or more poems may be submitted for registration on a single form with a single fee and deposit of one complete copy ...

A literary work is a work that explains, describes, or narrates a particular subject, theme, or idea through the use of narrative, descriptive, or explanatory text, rather than dialog or dramatic action.

As it emerged in my conversation with John Mullan at the Guardian book club in London, this may well be a novel whose popularity with readers has made some of its own sections redundant. But I still think the modern scenes are worth having: the phone call that Elizabeth makes to Gray and the visit she makes to poor Brennan in his Star and Garter home enact in symbolic form what I was trying to do: to reach out to the past. When Birdsong came out in 1993 it was generally, though not universally, well received.

Copyright shelters only fixed, original and creative expression, not the ideas or facts upon which the expression is based. For example, copyright may protect a particular song, novel or computer game about a romance in space, but it cannot ...

At the same time, poets urgently expressed their need to use material derived from the poems of others (including twentieth and twenty-first century writers) in their own work, and their desire to do so in ways that were both ethically and legally appropriate.

One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, William Cullen Bryant’s waterfowl, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s windhover, W. B. Yeats’s wild swans at Coole, Robinson Jeffers’s hawks, Wallace Stevens’s blackbird, Osip Mandelstam’s goldfinch, Randall Jarrell’s mockingbird . . . The tradition of imitating bird song is so strong that it sometimes begs for counterstatement, as in Michael Collier’s poem “In Certain Situations I’m Very Much Against Birdsong” (2011).

In the late eighteenth century, the Vice President of the Royal Society and friend of Gilbert White, Daines Barrington, conducted a series of experiments from which he concluded that ‘notes in birds are no more innate, than language is in man’ (‘Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds’, 1773-4). Barrington drew significant behavioural parallels between the nestling’s first attempts at song and ‘the imperfect endeavour in a child to babble’; he argued that slight variations between the songs of nightingales inhabiting different districts might be ‘appositely’ compared to human regional dialects. In my book, I trace the ‘science of birdsong’ as it developed from Barrington’s ‘ingenious’ experiments to the increasingly controversial, evolutionary arguments of Charles Darwin regarding the origins of human music, speech and language.

Together with the artist Jackie Morris he has produced the sumptuous The Book of Birds, a “field guide” to 49 declining species: “A great thinning of the skies is underway,” they begin, suggesting that we are on the way to what the prophetic writer Rachel Carson, channeling Keats, called a “silent spring” where “no birds sing”. Oddly, when Macfarlane and his collaborator come to their acknowledgments at the end they make no reference to Baker, silently occluding The Peregrine despite nodding to a full spectrum of ornithological classics, from Bewick to “Enid Blyton (ed), Birds of the Wayside and Woodland”. But there is no escaping the Baker-lite quality of the prose: “You’re true ghost, Hen Harrier, pure ghost, holy ghost.