"Wurz Debur"

For the past three years, more & more Britons have been listening with rapt attention to a BBC program called Bird Song of the Month. Even non-bird-lovers have been won by the personality of the show's M.C., excitable, 68-year-old Dr. Ludwig Koch. Says Producer Desmond Hawkins: "The charm about Ludwig is that he is one of the few fanatics left."

Last week, Fanatic Koch propounded an interesting ornithological theory: that chaffinches have different accents in different parts of the world. Playing the song of a British chaffinch, German-accented Dr. Koch said: "Ant now, as you vill see by my next record, zee German chaffinch, unlike zee Kent chaffinch, finishes op viz a sound like 'wurz debur.' " Sure enough, it did.

Despite the loss of a 6,000-record library when he fled Germany in 1936, Dr. Koch has today one of the world's greatest collections of bird and animal recordings. Muffled in an old tweed coat, he carries his recording equipment from the Scottish moors to the Salisbury Plain, "creeping like a criminal," he says, to capture the call of the grass warbler. Badgered by such background noises as airplanes, trains, barking dogs and high winds, he has triumphantly recorded the moorland cry of the greenshank and the "singing" of the seal on the spray-splashed rocks off the Pembrokeshire coast. He is postponing his retirement at least until he can get on wax the elusive stone curlew and the long-tailed tit.

For good reason, he loves his adopted England. "In England," he explains happily, "it is everyzing for zee birds and animals. It is amazing how zey understand how important it is."

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