Bird Balladeers

It's common around here for us to hear several birds singing at once—especially in spring and summer, when they are declaring their territories, attracting mates, and just feeling good enough to croon and warble. Do birds sing for joy? Do they become energized by beautiful weather and unable to stop themselves from belting out a ballad or two? I don't think anyone knows if birds get excited about a pretty day and if it moves them to song. Regardless, I have decided that they are exhibiting some delight at just being alive. So I say they are singing out of genuine pleasure.

It's a delight to hear all the various bird ballads overlapping each other, as if they are in competition to see who can win the Avian Opus Award. It's an added bonus when I am able to watch a bird sing, while it is nearby. It's an uncommon experience, since most birds keep pretty quiet when a human is around. On those rare occasions when I'm close enough I can see its body swell up or its bill point to the sky, as it quivers during its burst of song.

Birds are literally built to sing. When we humans talk or sing, we use only about 2% of our exhaled air. Birds are far more efficient—they use virtually all of their out-breath. Our larynx is our voice box, which contains our vocal cords, the source of sound. Birds have a much more complex sound mechanism, that begins in what's called their syrinx. Just at the juncture of their bronchi (the two windpipes from their lungs) with the trachea, the walls of the syrinx have many tiny muscles that change its shape and generate their complex songs.

These muscles are so intricate that a bird can sing anywhere from a single note to a complex blend of harmonic multiple tones. In fact, some birds—the operatic thrushes, for example—can sing two songs simultaneously; sort of like a two-handed piano player, but with one throat! Try that sometime! The sounds that emanate from the syrinx muscles get further changed when a bird pulsates its throat or wiggles its head or bill. The result is an artistic concert that can't be beat.

Some 60% of all birds are true songbirds—the real melodic singers of the avian family. The remainder of birds don't really sing; they're quackers, screamers, croakers, cooers, squawkers, clatterers, and (bill) snappers.

Not only do we not know if birds sing from enjoyment, we are quite ignorant of how much information they communicate to each other when they make sounds. Sure, they may be declaring territory or wooing a mate, but they obviously send other kinds of messages that we can only guess at. There are subtleties to their language that we have yet to learn.

We humans tend not to give birds (or most any other animal) much credit for intelligence, because their simple vocalizations do not seem to have the range of meanings that our words do. But when birds who are able to imitate our words—such as parrots—learn a good number of words, we find them going on to construct simple sentences in creative ways. We tend to look upon this as a lower form of intelligence, when it's really not fair to judge their cognitive abilities on the basis of well they manipulate our language—something quite alien to them. How would space traveling beings from elsewhere look upon our mental capabilities, after we learn a handful of their “words” and then tried to use them to construct simple phrases?

Turn it around, and humans do a pretty poor job of making sense of animal language and forms of communications. It's pretty obvious from those who closely observe animals that their ability to communicate is very sophisticated, when we see how intelligently they respond to their environment. In fact, most of us can't even whistle the simplest of bird songs! And if we develop a rudimentary skill at it, we completely miss the nuances that birds easily pick up, such as regional accents, the age of the singer, the distance between them, how serious the caller is, etc. Birds not only can understand these details, but can discern the call of a close relative from among the simultaneous sounds of many birds of the same species—such as penguin parents locating their chick from among a crowd of hundreds. Is that not an exceptional skill?

While I recognize my ignorance of most of the meaning and message of birdsong, I still can thrill to their concerts and even imagine what they're saying. Although it may add to my deeper understanding if I were able to know who is the composer of particular strain of orchestral music I hear, I can still thrill to the sensation it brings to the back of my neck. A bird's artistry makes me pause in my work and become absorbed by the beauty of his song. And the more I listen, the more I hear and appreciate. I've got lots of listening to do!

[Some of the specifics of how birds make their songs I got from a neat little book by Barry Kent MacKay: Bird Sounds, 2001.]