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Chapter Seven: Birdsong
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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129 Chapter Seven Birdsong To admit some degree of rationality in animals seemed to entail admitting that animals have immortal souls, while to deny them immortal souls seemed to entail denying them not only any degree of rationality but perhaps even the ability to experience pain and pleasure. – Angus Taylor, Animals & Ethics (39) The study of song-learning in birds has begun to alter the long-held image of birds as unintelligent creatures of instinct. – Don Stap, Birdsong: A Natural History (78) Birds have notes in between our notes—you try to imitate something they do and, like, maybe it’s between F and F#, and you’ll have to go up or come down on the pitch. It’s really something! – Eric Dolphy, qtd. in Simosko and Tepperman (13) In addition to poets, ornithologists and musicologists have long been interested in the sounds birds make. According to well-known recorder of wildlife sounds Lang Elliott, “[t]he question of why birds sing can be approached from two perspectives: the scientific perspective, which derives from evolutionary biology, and the poetic perspective, which springs from our emotional experience of hearing birds sing” (Music 11). Elliott reinforces the common distinction between scientists’ “attempts to describe bird behaviour free of emotion and anthropomorphic interpretation”and poets’ concerns “with feelings and the effects of bird song on human emotion” (11). According to Lutwack, “The song of birds is especially cherished by poets, probably because it is the only animal utterance with sound patterns just close enough to those made by people to tease us into the belief that bird 130 • Chapter Seven song is like human language”(46). More accurately, birdsong is music, which is not to say that birds do not communicate via song. Some birds produce notes humans cannot hear without visual aid in the form of sonograms or computer software that enables us to slow recordings down, effectively stretching notes out to isolate subtle variations in pitch. Ever since a young German boy recorded the song of an Indian shama with a phonograph, hence producing “the first known recorded birdsong” (Stap 28), technological advances have enabled more and more detailed approaches to understanding avian music. Since the development of the audiospectograph, or sonogram, ornithologists have been able to listen to birdsong in entirely different ways by combining humans’visual capacity with our limited ability to distinguish sounds. In The Singing Life of Birds, Kroodsma admits that his sense of hearing is“actually pretty pathetic”and that he has“no musical ability whatsoever”; like most humans, however, he has “well-trained eyes, and it is with [his] eyes that [he] hears” (2). As the field of ethology, the scienti fic study of animal behaviour led by Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz, was developing, so was the sonogram becoming regularized as an instrument fit for fieldwork that could provide insight into the instinctive and learned behaviours of birds. The visualization of birdsong opened up the possibility that birds have evolved cultural traits. Why some birds have evolved a large vocal repertoire while others have not remains a mystery. Of the birds whose songs McKay pays homage to, chipping sparrows and white-crowned sparrows, for example, sing only one song each; wood thrushes, by contrast, sing twenty songs; and at the far end of the repertoire spectrum, mockingbirds have 250 songs and brown thrashers an “incomparable” 2,000 or more (Stap 89). Ornithologists can safely say, based on years of research, that birds sing and call“to establish territories and to make themselves attractive to potential mates” (Rothenberg 8). McKay addresses the former reason in “Territoriality” (SD 89–91), in which he describes how red-winged blackbirds determine and defend their territories: they are sewing their imagined patterns vertex to vertex perching on the spruce tips and the frayed cigars of last year’s cattails singing konkeree konkeree flashing epaulets of red with yellow fringes hunching forward signalling the outlines of their small and shifting kingdoms to the others who are signalling the outlines of their small and shifting kingdoms back. (89) [3.236.18.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:07 GMT) Birdsong • 131 Despite the potential distance insinuated by the multiple metaphors— sewing, vertices, frayed cigars—it seems entirely plausible that these birds are imagining patterns with their famous song konkeree, or conk-la-ree. To think otherwise would be to reinforce the idea of birds as “unintelligent creatures of instinct”; though instinct doubtless plays a role in how birds...