Watching BirdsStornoway, Beachcomber's Windowsill

The song that says out loud what the rest of the catalogue only implies. The singer is an ornithologist; this is what that sounds like.

Exactly what it says

Stornoway have written about birds for twenty years, mostly obliquely — a species name here, a migration there, a whole album called after a great skua. Watching Birds is the track where the subject is simply the subject.

It works because it is not whimsical about it. Watching birds is a patient, cold, often boring activity that occasionally delivers something extraordinary, and the song has the shape of that experience rather than of a pastoral daydream.

The music

Eighth on the album and three minutes and twenty-three seconds, it is one of the lighter arrangements on the record: guitar, voice, a restrained rhythm section and the harmony coming in at the ends of lines rather than across whole phrases.

It got its own video, in the same homemade tradition as the band’s earlier ones, and remained a live fixture through both eras of the band.

The through-line

Five years later the band made Bonxie, an album named after a seabird with real recorded birdsong pressed into the arrangements. Eleven years after that they were writing songs drawn from transformation myths for Beyonder and contributing to a soundscape of Britain’s rarest habitats.

Watching Birds is where that line starts on record. It is not a novelty track; it is a statement of the band’s actual subject.

The video, and the live life

The song got a video in the same homemade register as the band’s earlier ones, made without a budget and better for it, and it stayed in the live set across both eras of the band.

It is also one of the pieces that works best stripped down, which is why it suits the acoustic treatment the band gave their catalogue on Best of Unplucked in 2024 at the end of a tour of churches.

A song about patient observation, played in a building designed for sitting still and listening, is about as close to a natural habitat as a piece of music gets.

What the reviews said at the time

Alexis Petridis, reviewing Beachcomber’s Windowsill for the Guardian on 20 May 2010, used this track to make his sharpest criticism of the band. It churns along on two chords, he wrote, before lapsing into the double-time drumming of old US hardcore punk, and sounds deeply unpersuasive — his comparison was Hugh Grant cast as Henry Rollins in a Black Flag biopic.

The judgement is about register, not about the subject. Nobody doubted that the singer meant the birds; the doubt was about the band reaching for a kind of force that is not theirs.

It is the clearest instance on the record of the gap between what this band can do and what they were, that year, still trying.

In the sequence

On the record it follows Here Comes the Blackout...! and leads into On the Rocks. That puts it eighth of eleven, at 3:23.

Nothing was lifted off the record here — for how Beachcomber's Windowsill was made, see its own page.