I found an old recorder, a type of flute, tucked away in a sock. I’ve been learning to play it — outside, to avoid driving my family nuts. Me and sheet music don’t get along yet, so it mostly sounds like a merry birdy gabble with snatches of barely recognizable Irish tunes.
In a bush nearby I’ve been hearing the liquid gabble of practicing Golden-crowned sparrows, fresh from the North. I know they were born this spring because they’re only “singing” these babbly liquid burble sounds, with snatches of barely recognizable sparrow-tune.
By spring, they’ll perfect it, and fly back north to hold territories and call mates and scream at their neighbors with those cascading liquid whistles of the Golden-crowned, which they learned first from their fathers.
Songbirds, scientists used to think, needed to hear their parents’ songs while still in the nest, during a critical period of sensitivity, in order to learn. Some rather cruel experiments involving isolated and sometimes surgically deafened baby birds in the lab proved that male nestlings who missed this crucial window never learned their kinds’ songs terribly well.
But then we learned they never stop learning. And they need to hear their neighbors, too. An ornithologist, Donald Kroodsma, banded Bewick’s Wrens in the nest and followed them for several years as they gabbled and garbled their father’s songs, migrated, returned, chose new territories — and sang, with crisp perfection, the varied and unfamiliar songs of their new neighbors.
Just once, only once, did Kroodsma catch a wren singing a brief snippet of his father’s song, a phrase his neighbors never sang. The wrens remembered their parents’ verbal weapons — they just didn’t use them unless necessary.
Can you imaging human musicians who don’t know each other, defending their houses by singing back and forth? One starts “Banish Misfortune,” and everyone else immediately screams “Banish Misfortune” back even louder. Eventually somebody tries the “Fairy Reel” and everyone else immediately drowns them in repetition of “Fairy Reel.” Birds do this — it’s called countersinging. Next spring, you can hear the Bewick’s Wrens do it around Taylor Lake and Riverfront Park.
Humans and birds. We’re more similar than you’d think.
Birds just know to wage a lovelier, and less apocalyptic, form of war.
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