Why Birds Sing

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David Rothenberg has gained international fame in an unusual way: He is a composer and jazz clarinetist who improvises to the accompaniment of natural sounds. In 2000, he began to play live with singing birds, and his experiences prompted him to seek answers to many questions: What meanings can birdsong have? Why do some birds speak in simple peeps, while others give voice to complicated song motifs? Do birds sing merely mechanically, for finding mates and defending territory, or can they feel joy when they sing?

In Why Birds Sing, Rothenberg asks these questions repeatedly, tackling them in each chapter in different ways. If the book is read in a single sitting, the repetition of the questions can become wearying, as though Rothenberg thought the chapters might be read in isolation. The table of contents makes this unlikely, as the chapter titles are floridly metaphorical (“To Drink the Sound,” “The Opposite of Time”), diminishing their usefulness for keyword searching in library catalogs.

However, the repetitions amid the various approaches in all ten chapters may have been intentional, as Rothenberg more probably intended his writing to imitate music: He excels at analyzing the reiterations and improvisations within the simplest of bird songs and the most complex of human symphonies. His prose is jazzy and rhapsodical“I laugh, and the bird laughs some more. His laugh is a melody, a saxophone laugh, a Charlie Parker laugh”and his arrangement of themes may be equally intentional, only apparently unpremeditated.

One chapter, for instance, summarizes centuries of research and speculations into these questions, though further summaries appear throughout the rest of the volume, as though enhancements on later motifs felt more appropriate to Rothenberg than rigorous orderliness. Indeed, as a compendium of the literature on birdsong, the book is valuable and thorough. Rothenberg asserts that there is more nature writing on birds than on any other animals, and his evidence ranges from the Roman writer Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 94-55 b.c.e.) to philosophers Immanuel Kant and Henry David Thoreau to poets John Keats, Walt Whitman, and T. S. Eliot to polymath George Meredith. In the ensuing chapter, Rothenberg looks at various theories, from the scientific studies of ornithologists to the populist, lyrical musings of nineteenth century naturalists, as to why birds sing.

Elsewhere, Rothenberg codifies birdsong from a professional musician’s point of view, and the black-and-white illustrations include reprints of the musical notations of many naturalists who tried to capture avian tunes via transcription. Rothenberg covers the history of sound recording equipment and of birdwatchers’ use of it to capture birdsong. Rothenberg rhapsodizes over the dadaist printouts of sonograms (graphs of sound spectrograms); he likes his science mixed with aesthetics. He describes the “playback experiments” of scientists such as Cambridge University zoologist W. H. Thorpe, who studied chaffinch songs for decades, and his student, University of California, Davis ornithologist Peter Marler, who would play all kinds of recorded bird songs to chaffinches in captivity and note their responses.

Rothenberg encapsulates neurobiological studies in which songbird brains and syrinxes are removed for examination. Studies of canary brains, for instance, disproved the long-held hypothesis that adult brains continue to develop new neurons, a discovery that has benefited medical science. In another chapter, he describes remarkable human compositions influenced by the music of birds: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Musikalischer Spass,” Antonio Vivaldi’s “Il Gardellino” (“The Goldfinch”), Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, the “Pastoral,” Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” and “Catalogue d’Oiseaux,” and those of more recent musicians who use state-of-the-art musical equipment to sample and mimic bird songs, such as Magnus Robb and Pamela Z.

(This entire section contains 1683 words.)

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Rothenberg is convinced that birds sing for joy and know their music is beautiful. So why is he obsessed with explaining why birds sing? The problem seems to be that most scientists do not want to anthropomorphize birdsto assume that because humans can enjoy making music, birds can too. Rothenberg argues the opposite: that those scientists are too anthropocentric in their presumption that humans have aesthetic faculties not to be found in the rest of the animal kingdom. “No scientist worth his data set really wants to tell you why birds sing. There’s enough to examine in the quest to figure out how birds sing, and especially how complex behavior is learned in a very short time. . . . But the patterns don’t explain why the song is there.”

The lay reader who is not a musician or an ethologist will most enjoy the anecdotes with which Rothenberg shores up his arguments. Stories of interactions between people and birds are charming:In southeastern Australia they tell a story about the superb lyrebird, widespread in the hills of the states of Victoria and New South Wales. This species possesses a shared and learned sense of song that is passed down from generation to generation. In the 1930’s in Dorrigo, New South Wales, a flute-playing farmer kept a young lyrebird as a pet for several years. In all that time, the bird learned to imitate just one small fragment of the farmer’s flute playing. . . . After a time, the farmer released the bird into the forest. Thirty years later, lyrebirds in the adjacent New England National Park were found to have flutelike elements in their song, a sound not heard in other populations of superb lyrebirds. . . . It is now seventy years since a lyrebird learned these fragments, and today the flute song has been heard a hundred kilometers from the original source. A human tune is spreading through the lyrebird world.

Such tales, particularly of birds who mimic, such as the starling and the mockingbird, are plentiful. Rothenberg writes much about the remarkable starling, an irritant to birdwatchers but a delight to laboratory scientists, as researchers at the University of Indiana found:Only the five birds that had extensive daily contact with people learned to mimic human sounds. They would recognize simple phrases and recombine them in odd ways. “Basic research,” one said. “Basic research, it’s true, I guess that’s right.” One bird, which needed to have its claws treated for an infection, squirmed while held, screaming, “I have a question!” Another bird would imitate the sound of the fluorescent light above his cage, especially one time when the power was out, as if yearning for the light to come back. A third copied a teapot’s whistle, and when [researcher Marianne] Engle got a new, non-whistling kettle, the bird would still whistle whenever the pot was placed on the stove. These birds knew more than the realm of sounds surrounding themthey could place the sounds in a context. These stories suggest that birds’ ability to imitate a wide range of sounds may have something to do with a sense of themselves in an environment. . . . Social species like starlings seem to use songs in subtle interactive ways that are far more nuanced than attraction or defense.

Another species, the marsh warbler, relies entirely on mimicking, and imitates birds it hears when it migrates back and forth between northern Europe and east Africa. An amazed birdwatcher discovered it is “the one bird in the world who can recount its migratory path as a kind of songline, where the journey is mapped into the music itself.”

Many of the facts readers will encounter may surprise and intrigue. For instance, birds that need to defend their territory tend to have more complex and splendid songs. On the other hand, these birds that sing as part of a “sonic arms race” do not need beautiful songs, only songs identifiable from a great distance; the beauty is gratuitous. Some species have simple songs and do not sing often; those that produce complex and variable songs, such as the mockingbird, tend to sing for hours a day. Also, very few kinds of animals employ vocal learning. Humans, whales and dolphins, and birds do, which implies that natural selection works against vocal learning, perhaps because it attracts predators, perhaps for some undiscovered reason. (Naturalist Charles Darwin believed that animals have an innate aesthetic sense and feel emotions.) The satin bowerbird of Australia, famous for the mating bowers he builds and decorates with blue flowers, bottle tops, ball-point pens, or other items to attract a mate, will actually kill other blue birds if it cannot find anything else blue; the color is essential for attracting a mate to the nest.

Rothenberg’s emphasis on beauty and poetry is notable even in the index, which includes such terms as “exaltation,” “fun,” and “sublime.” His book is meant to persuade, and readers who readily accept that birds enjoy singing, just as horses enjoy running and dogs enjoy playing, will be convinced with ease. Whether he will persuade ornithologists matters more to Rothenberg than it will to the casual reader. Rothenberg wants to poeticize science for the lay reader, but he also entreats scientists to accept poetry in their speculations as well as crunched numbers. He is likelier to influence mavericks and interdisciplinarians than hidebound ethologists.

His tone ranges from the exuberant to the plaintive to the contentious: “There are no answers at the end of bird song papers, just further dreams and guesses as to the elusive reasons why.” He concludes on a personal note:Why must they [human and bird] both sing? By this point it’s more Zen koan than question. . . . I play along with birds to enter a new kind of improvisation, with a musician from another species. I want to engage, to interact, to create together, not to sign my territory or find a mate. What does he want? Who does he think I am?

Most readers will likely be caught up in Rothenberg’s yearning and frustration and be satisfied by the rapturous musings on his years of study. This is certainly a book ethologists will enjoy and ponder, and musicians will find the accompanying CD of the same title (published separately by Terra Nova Music), which contains twelve tracks of his music set to birdsong, stimulating and provocative. Both academic and public libraries will find the volume a good investment.