The songs of some birds belong to their species, inherited, shared. The wood pigeons sing the same five-note phrase today as their long-gone cousins did when I was on my way to school. The yellowhammer still tweets its nursery rhyme: ‘a little bit of bread and no cheese’. The buzzards still shed their thin calls from thermal heights, like dropped needles. We know them by their calls as much as by their flight or feathers, more perhaps, like the small birds in the hedge which are heard and not seen.

How strange … What mechanisms lead them to utter only those shared songs? What constrains their muscles and their breath to such specific performances? A shape of the larynx or a pattern in the brain?

We, on the other hand, proud individuals, each produce our own assemblages of sound, in different tongues and tones. What would it be like if every time you opened your mouth to speak the same thing came out? And even more strange, if the same thing came out of every other human mouth too. Every utterance as unmodulated as the noises off emitted by our guts, as unvarying as the chime of a bell. Would we find ways to express our separate selves – by timing perhaps, a Morse code of calls?

But maybe the apparent sameness of some birds’ calls is only a symptom of our unsubtle hearing. Maybe every pigeon’s coo is as finely crafted and as variable to their ears as are our infinitely productive tongues.

Or perhaps, to those single-tongued creatures, our constantly inconstant speech sounds like a Babel, a cacophony, the chaotic clamour of a flock of lost souls, flailing and flapping with a thesaurus, who have forgotten, or never found, their ur-syllable, their logos, their essential, final, perfect word.