Bitterns are booming, both literally and metaphorically. These handsome brown birds from the heron family make a noise quite unlike anything else in Britain and we are lucky to be able to hear it. If there is such a thing as a birding bucket list then hearing a bittern’s ‘boom’ — the loudest bird call in the country — should be on it.
Before the bittern starts booming he performs a warm-up ritual called grunting. He strengthens his throat muscles, which expand to turn his gullet into an echo chamber. His powerful muscles make up a fifth of his body weight and can propel the sound of his boom for more than three miles.
As for the sound itself, although it has been recorded at 100 decibels in volume, it is far more musical than the word ‘boom’ suggests. Less Brian Blessed shouting, more the Righteous Brothers during the first few bars of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’’. Others have compared it with the sound of those jugs in bluegrass music from America’s Deep South. For me, I’d describe it not so much a ‘boom’ as an ‘oom’ — try going ‘boom’ from the back of your throat but without moving your lips.
It is the males who boom and each call is unique, like an audible fingerprint. This makes it easier to monitor numbers. In the 1990s there were just 11 males across the whole of the country, putting bitterns on the brink of UK extinction and not for the first time. A hundred years earlier they almost died out as a result of shooting, slow breeding and the loss of reedbeds, their habitat.
Before then, the bittern was fairly common and had several regional nicknames, such as bog blutter, buttle, miredrum, bumbagus and bitore, which Chaucer says ‘bombleth in the myre’.
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