Six Hundred Hours of Birdsong

The recordings are on a hard drive in a drawer and there are four thousand and eleven of them.

Each is roughly nine minutes. Each was made in the same back garden in Radcliffe, from a microphone on the same fence post, starting forty minutes before sunrise, between March and July, every year from 2013 to 2023.

Six hundred and one hours of birdsong.

Arun Sengupta, who made them, was an accountant. He had no ornithological training and never acquired any; he could identify perhaps eleven species by ear at the end and had been able to identify four at the start.

He died in November.

What his daughter assumed

Mira assumed it was a hobby, because that is what it looked like, and because her father had a history of hobbies conducted at a level of thoroughness that the family found funny — the sourdough period, the year of the telescope, the extremely brief but intense involvement with model railways in 2009.

She assumed the birdsong was the same thing that had lasted.

She intended to keep a few and delete the rest, because six hundred hours is a great deal of drive space for a hobby, and because she is her father's daughter and would like the drawer sorted.

What is actually on them

She listened to the first one on a Tuesday in January because she felt she should listen to at least one.

Nine minutes. Blackbird, robin, something she could not name. A distant road. A gate somewhere.

At six minutes fourteen, a door opens.

Then her mother's voice, close, not to the microphone, saying: "You'll catch your death out here."

And her father, off to one side: "Two minutes."

Then the door.

The pattern

Her mother died in July 2023.

The recordings stop in July 2023.

Mira sat with this for about a week before she could go back to the drive, and then she went back to it methodically, because methodically is the only way she knows how to do anything, and she built — she is aware of the irony — a spreadsheet.

She sampled two hundred recordings across eleven years and logged every human sound.

Her mother appears in about one in nine.

Sometimes it is a sentence. More often it is a door, or a tap running through an open window, or a radio switched on at a distance and switched off again, or footsteps on the path and then nothing.

In the 2013 recordings she is loud and frequent. She comes out. She complains about the cold. On 4 May 2013 she says something that makes Arun laugh so hard he knocks the microphone stand, and there are nine seconds of handling noise, and he has kept the file.

In 2019 she is quieter and further away. She is in the kitchen more than the garden.

In 2022 she is a door and a radio.

In 2023, in the last four recordings, she is not there at all.

What Mira thinks he was doing

She has changed her mind four times.

Her first thought was that he was recording her mother deliberately — that the birds were a pretext, and that he had been secretly assembling an archive of his wife.

She does not think that now. There is too much evidence against it: he never mentioned it, he never once repositioned the microphone toward the house, and there are hundreds of recordings with no human sound at all that he kept with equal care.

Her second thought was that it was pure coincidence, and that she was constructing a story out of a man's hobby and her own grief, which is a thing people do.

Where she has ended up is somewhere less tidy.

She thinks he was recording the garden at dawn because he liked it, for eleven years, and that his wife was in the garden at dawn because that was where he was, and that he kept every file because he kept everything, and that the archive of a marriage was assembled entirely by accident by two people who were only trying to have a nice morning.

Which is, Mira thinks, the more interesting thing, and much harder to say out loud.

The one from 2015

There is one file she has listened to more than the others. 22 May 2015.

At about four minutes there is a long stretch of very good birdsong and no human sound.

At seven minutes twenty, the door.

Her mother comes out, and does not say anything, and there are footsteps on the path, and then nothing for ninety seconds.

Then Arun, very quietly, presumably to her, in the tone of a man who has been asked something:

"That's a wren. Little thing. Makes all that noise."

And her mother says: "Where?"

And he says: "There. On the—"

And that is where the recording ends, because it was nine minutes, and he had set it to nine minutes in 2013 and never changed it.

What she is doing with them

Nothing, for now.

She has had four conversations with a sound archive in Manchester that would take the whole thing for its dawn chorus collection. Eleven consecutive years from one fixed point is genuinely valuable to them; there is real data in it about species timing.

She is going to give it to them. She has decided that.

She is going to give them everything, and not mention any of the rest, because it is not what they are for, and because a researcher in 2050 listening for shifts in blackbird onset does not need to be told that the door at six minutes fourteen is a woman telling a man he will catch his death.

Mira has made a copy of that one. Just that one.

She has not decided yet whether she is ever going to listen to it again, and she has stopped feeling that she needs to decide.