Do you ever wish you could simply transpose the forest’s morning melodies directly into writing?
But how to translate into written word the sweetness sung by a baby chickadee as he wobbles through the songs he’s learning? Or the querying call of a curious one hopping closer, spruce branch to spruce branch until, bravely, she hops to the branch of a juneberry bush over my head only to flutter sharply back to a more comfortable distance and begin the process over again, chirping inquisitively all the while. Inquisitive is the word I’d use, but there’s also a sense of bravado in her tone too.
Birdsong is a language passed from one generation of songbirds to the next with many individual males, such as the hermit thrush, creating their own unique songs using the language they’ve learned. I’ve heard young white-throated sparrows trying hard to master the technique of their people’s language – frequently the ending note falls flat. But practice makes perfect.
Fascinatingly, some songbirds are known to have dialects. Chickadees, for example, while sharing common traits in their songs (the phoebe and chickadee calls are some), vary in how they sing those songs depending on where they grew up and learned how to sing. If you’re a master of chickadee song, you’d be able to identify where any chickadee came from by the way they sing the musical language of the chickadee.
According to ornithologist David Kroodsma in The Singing Life of Birds, experiments have been done with songbirds and Western music. In these experiments, given a choice and without training, individual songbirds showed preferences for particular human composers such as Schoenberg or Vivaldi. To add to the wonder of this, “[t]he experiment was taken one step further when other sparrows were trained extensively with either a Bach or a Schoenberg composition. Those sparrows then favored other pieces by the same composers they were trained with.” Later, given a choice between a composer who was of the same period as the one they trained with over another from another musical period (for example, Baroque or modern), they chose the songs from the period with which they were familiar.[1]
Whether it’s the young chickadee showing off his progress as he proudly warbles through the tune his father taught him or the cry of a hawk as she’s startled from her aspen perch at the edge of our wildwood meadow, there’s so much more to birdsong than just a pretty tune or instinctual vocalizations.
As humans we can only skitter across the surface of bird language, yet we’ve long yearned to know why the wild bird sings. Perhaps, however, it’s simply enough to be gifted with the ability to listen.
[1] Kroodsma, Donald. The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong. NY: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005: 274.
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