Birds Gotta Sing

WHY DO BIRDS SING? The short answer is, to establish territories and attract mates. To David Rothenberg, a philosophy professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a jazz clarinetist, that standard scientific explanation doesn’t adequately explain why bird songs are often more complex and more beautiful than they need to be to ensure continuation of the species. He decided to write this book after a thrush native to Southeast Asia made him suspect there was more to the story.

This happened early one morning at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, when Rothenberg and an artist friend, a flutist, entered the Rainforest Room and began to play along with the songs of awakening birds. They jam with birds because, as Rothenberg later explains, “One animal’s song reaches out to another. When music starts to happen between humans and birds, you don’t have to peel apart the categories of manmade and natural. . . . As in the hottest jam session, it doesn’t matter who’s from where . . . it’s the sound that counts.”

A robin-size bird seemed particularly interested in the sounds coming from Rothenberg’s clarinet. The bird cocked his head, hopped around as if dancing, and produced rhythmic calls and short melodies that counterpointed Rothenberg’s riffs. Unsure whether he was in a duet or a musical battle, Rothenberg was nonetheless enthralled. Was this strange bird–a white-crested laughing thrush, according to the aviary’s cleaning lady–sending him a message?

Rothenberg starts to wonder whether birds sing not only because they can, but also because they enjoy it. Are they making music? Or does it all really come down to science, to that deadly serious business of outcompeting rivals and securing mates?

Although the aesthete in me wants to believe that birds are true musicians, the amateur ornithologist in me questioned whether a man who jams with birds could manage a serious investigation into the musical aspects of avian bioacoustics, if indeed they exist. My skepticism grew when I took a careful look at the full-page illustration of the bird purported to inspire Why Birds Sing. Opposite page one, and labeled “The Laughing Thrush,” this illustration actually depicts a Eurasian jay. Rothenberg’s philosophical credentials tempered my doubts somewhat. Perhaps the only other book to delve deeply into the provocative realm of bird songs as music was the well-regarded Born to Sing, written in 1973 by Charles Hartshorne, himself a philosopher.

Rothenberg’s book is more readable than Hartshorne’s. It is also informed by recent research on bird songs, including that of Donald Kroodsma, whose own Singing Life of Birds came out earlier this year (and whose work on bird-song repertoires and dialects figures prominently in the recent Birdsong: A Natural History by Don Stap). “I’ve studied bird song for more than forty years, but I don’t know a thing at all about music,” Kroodsma once told Rothenberg. “Perhaps it’s time to change that.”

Poring through the literature of scientists, naturalists, poets, and composers, Rothenberg searches “desperately” for what might be called a unified theory, one that could bring the Walt Whitmans and Donald Kroodsmas of the world into perfect harmony over the question of why birds sing. He never finds it. Why not? The short answer is, a unified theory implies conclusions provable by science, and as Rothenberg comes to realize, this kind of knowledge remains beyond our grasp.

I suspect that Rothenberg sees rather quickly the futility of searching for a unified theory, yet he persists because the art and science of bird song turn out to be so tantalizing. Paradoxically, many readers who start Why Birds Sing as skeptics will come away from Rothenberg’s sweeping and personalized survey convinced that birds create music and enjoy doing so, despite the absence of scientific proof.

So what if science hasn’t caught up with what some people know to be true intuitively? Until this year, scientific consensus said that the ivory-billed woodpecker was extinct. The last scientifically credible sighting had been in 1944. Now and then some “amateur” would claim to have seen an ivory bill, and though such sightings continued through the decades, almost all were discounted. That’s why you can’t find the ivory bill in the field guides of David Sibley and Kenn Kaufman, who represent the latest generation in field guide authorship. Now that the amateurs have proven to be correct, such books are due for a significant revision.

This is not to say that Rothenberg is an amateur when it comes to the science of bird song. On the contrary, this clarinetist of the woods soon defies the tree-hugging stereotype he flirts with in Chapter 1. The scientific side of his exhaustive study begins with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. According to Rothenberg, Darwin had trouble explaining the evolutionary advantage of extremely complex and musical bird songs, such as that of the mockingbird (Rothenberg’s favorite songster). “These are not obviously useful adaptations,” observes Rothenberg. “If they are the result of years of selection, there must be something other than mere efficiency at work in nature.”

Darwin’s successors have offered explanations of their own–Amotz Zahavi’s handicap principle, for example. Why does the male mockingbird perform a long and elaborate song, one that may borrow from the repertoire of every other bird species in the neighborhood? Because by “handicapping” himself in this way, he exhibits the qualities that female mockingbirds prefer. His musical variety and his stamina send a signal that helps him find a mate.

Rothenberg distrusts the handicap principle and any other scientific hypothesis that makes beautiful songs seem almost incidental to the lives of birds. He also distrusts science’s preoccupation with quantifying things: “It wants to measure the degree of complexity in a song, the number of motifs, the sheer length, the amount of variation, all tabulated, an asymptotic curve flattening out to a limit.”

On the other hand, Rothenberg isn’t convinced that poets have gotten any closer to the truth. “Bird song challenges science and art alike to extend their reach,” he says. I’m reminded of what Ben Hecht wrote toward the end of his autobiography: “To think like a dog, or even a goose, would be a decided advantage to any writer. He would be observing life without human confusion, and bound to find some wonderful news.”

Rothenberg’s antidote to the confusion is another jam session, but this time he and his flutist friend from Pittsburgh travel to a dark forest in Australia. Armed with only their instruments and a tape recorder, they park themselves in the territory of a wild Albert’s lyrebird known as George. Males of this species dance around and display a large and colorful lyre-shaped tail when they sing, and, like the mockingbird, they mimic the songs of other birds.

George does not disappoint. Like the white-crested laughing thrush, he seems to respond to the human musicians. While Rothenberg plays along, he’s flooded with memories of the years of research that brought him to this amphitheater of tangled underbrush and fallen trees. He tries to make some sense of it all in the book’s final chapter, “Becoming a Bird,” itself an improvisation that switches between his breathless woodland gig and ruminations on what he’s learned. He reproduces the sonogram that graphs the tape recording of his clarinet and George’s voice, triumphantly labeling it “Interspecies Music at Last.”

The confusion lingers, but maybe this “gift of the song” is enough–“one simple offering from human to animal and back.”

Robert Winkler is the author of Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness.