“The Most Joyous Creatures in the World”

Recently, Ceronetti, like the Semitic scholar that he is, “reread” the Song of the Great Wild Rooster; by curious coincidence, almost simultaneously I chanced to reread, like the zoologist that I am not, In Praise of Birds, by Giacomo Leopardi.1 After decades of intensive and widely popularized studies of animal behavior, the impression one comes away with is singular and vaguely alienating, not unlike the feeling one might have when contemplating the morning star Venus (it is precisely during these clear dawns that it reaches its greatest splendor) after reading that its luminous brightness, hailed by countless poets, is the result of the sun’s light being reflected through an atmosphere out of Dante’s Inferno, stifling, scorching, supercompressed, and, further, saturated with clouds of sulfuric acid. In both the former and the latter case, the poetic discourse that we perceive in the nature around us persists intact, but it has changed in tone and content.

Not that the desolate message of In Praise of Birds has diminished in value. For us, too, if we restrict ourselves to the songbirds that we know best, the ones that populate our gardens, hills, and yards, birds remain “the most joyous creatures in the world.” They strike us as happy because fate endowed them with song and flight, and Leopardi saw them in the same way, in part because nature, which so sharpened their senses, also gave them “most vivid powers of imagination”: not “profound, fervid, and stormy” but, rather, varied and nimble like that of children, whom they also resemble in their continuous and apparently pointless liveliness.

According to Leopardi, it is possible for them to be happy because they are free of any awareness of life’s vanity. And so they are unacquainted with boredom, an affliction specific to conscious humans, and the more dolorous the further human beings have distanced themselves from nature. Moreover, birds are protected against extremes of cold and heat, and if the environment turns hostile they can migrate until they find better living conditions. Yet even though they’re independent, and free by definition, they’re still sensitive to human presence, and their voices are loveliest where the customs of humanity are loveliest.

This song of theirs, which Leopardi identifies as the distinctive feature of birds and a marker of their happiness, is gratuitous, a laughter-song, an “expression of gladness,” capable of transmitting this gladness to those who hear it, “by bearing witness, delusive though it may be, to the gladness of the world.” Likewise, the agitation of birds, the fact that they are “seen never at rest,” is a pure manifestation of joy; it occurs “for no apparent reason,” while their flight is simply “a delight to them.” In conclusion, Leopardi, or, to be exact, the imaginary philosopher of antiquity to whom In Praise of Birds is attributed, would like (but “only for a time”) “to be converted into a bird, to taste the gladness of their life.”

These pages are firm and lucid, still valid, and their power comes from the constant, but unstated, comparison with the misery of the human condition, with our essential lack of freedom, symbolized by our earthbound nature. All the same, we may ask ourselves what Leopardi would have written if, instead of relying on Buffon, and limiting his focus to the birds whose song he listened to during the long evenings in his village, he had, for example, read the books of Konrad Lorenz and had extended his observations to include other types of birds. I think that, first of all, he would have given up trying to compare birds to human beings. To attribute such feelings as gaiety, boredom, and happiness to animals (with the possible exception of dogs and certain monkeys) is acceptable only in the context of poetry—otherwise it’s arbitrary and greatly misleading.

We might say the same of the interpretation of birdsong: animal behaviorists tell us that birdsong, especially when it is solitary and melodious (and therefore especially pleasing to us), has a very specific meaning, of defense of the bird’s territory and a warning to potential rivals or intruders. It would be more appropriate, then, to compare it not to human laughter but to less friendly human artifacts, such as the fences and gates with which landowners surround their property, or the intolerable electric alarms designed to scare burglars away from apartments.

As for the liveliness of birds (of some birds: others, such as wading birds, are relatively calm), this is a necessary solution to a problem of survival. It is observed chiefly in birds that feed on seeds or insects, and which are therefore obliged to be frantically active in their search for food, which is scattered over vast areas and often hard to find; at the same time, their high body temperature and the hard work of flying make it necessary for them to eat a great deal. Clearly, it’s a vicious cycle: working hard to obtain food, eating a great deal to make up for the costs of that hard work—a continuous loop that is not unfamiliar to most of the human race.

It was not my intent, with these rather simplistic considerations, to suggest that our admiration for birds is unjustified. It’s entirely justified, even if we accept the explanations that scientists (not without disagreements among themselves) provide: in fact, especially if we accept them, but then that admiration shifts its focus to different and more subtle virtues.

How can we help but admire, for example, the adaptability of starlings? Intensely gregarious, they had always dwelt around farmland, where they sometimes ravaged vineyards and olive groves. In the past few decades, they’ve discovered the cities: apparently they first settled in London in 1914, and only in the past few years have they come to Turin. Here, for their winter quarters, they’ve selected a few large trees, on Piazza Carlo Felice, Corso Turati, and elsewhere, whose branches, bare of leaves in winter, seem at nightfall to hang loaded with strange blackish fruit.

At dawn they set out in serried regiments “to go to work,” that is, to the fields outside the industrial belt; they come home at sunset, in gigantic flocks of thousands of individual birds, followed by scattered stragglers. Viewed from a distance, these flocks seem like clouds of smoke; then, suddenly, they display astonishing maneuvers, the cloud becomes a long ribbon, then a cone, then a sphere; at last, it spreads out again and, like an enormous arrow, points straight for its nightly shelter. Who commands that army? And how does he give his orders?

Nocturnal birds of prey are extraordinary hunting machines. Their unusual appearance, somewhat awkward when they are at rest, has always aroused curiosity and occasionally aversion. They are silent in flight, and have powerful claws and large forward-facing eyes that confer a vaguely human appearance, but even the biggest and most sensitive eyes are blind in total darkness. Nonetheless, it has been observed in rigorous experimental conditions that an owl is capable of snatching up a mouse with lightning speed, even in total darkness, as long as the mouse makes even the slightest noise. There is no doubt that the bird locates its prey through its sense of hearing, and the asymmetry of the bird’s ears, which has long been observed, probably plays a role; but just how the auditory signals are processed remains a mystery for now.

Deeper is the mystery of how birds orient themselves. We know that not all migratory birds use the same methods of orientation, and that many birds employ various strategies at the same time, relying upon one or the other depending on weather conditions; certainly, geographic landmarks and the position of the sun play a part, as do, probably, the Earth’s magnetic field and birds’ sense of smell.

But one is astonished, and struck by something approaching religious awe, to read that certain migratory birds who fly only on clear nights not only navigate by the stars but can determine their location with great precision from the configuration of the sky, even when they have been transported somewhere during an experiment. Moreover, it is not only birds that have previously flown with their flocks on migrations that are capable of this feat but even young birds on their first flight. In short, everything works as if they’d been born with a celestial map and an internal clock that is independent of local time, all stuffed into a brain that weighs under a gram.

No less wonderful is the behavior of the cuckoo, which by the light of our human morality seems to have been dictated by a twisted cunning. Instead of building a nest, the female cuckoo lays her egg in the nest of a smaller bird; the rightful owners of the nest often (though not always) fail to detect the intruder, sitting on the alien egg along with their own brood, until the baby cuckoo hatches. As soon as it emerges, still featherless and blind, it possesses a specific sensibility and intolerance: it cannot stand the presence of other eggs. It twists and turns and shoves until it has succeeded in pushing all the eggs of its supposed siblings out of the nest.

The two “parents” feed the chick frantically for days and days, until it has grown larger than them. It is like reading pulp fiction, and one is unsure whether to be more amazed at the perfection of the cuckoo’s instincts or at the lack of instincts in its involuntary hosts: but even in the games of nature there must be winners and losers.

Birds, in short, like other animals, may not know how to do all the things that we do, but they know how to do other things that we cannot do, or that we cannot do so well, or that we can do only with tools of some kind. If the experiment that Leopardi dreamed of could be carried out, we would return to our human semblances with many more arrows in our quiver.

1. Guido Ceronetti is an Italian philosopher and poet. The pair of texts mentioned are two of Leopardi’s Operette morali.