CHAPTER 12
The Secret Language of Birds
Birds scream at the top of their lungs in a horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth but sadly we don’t speak bird.
—KURT COBAIN
In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Nightingale,” the shrouded specter of death hovers over the gravely ill emperor of China, poised to take his soul at any moment, when a plucky little nightingale appears on the limb of a tree outside the royal bedroom. “She had heard of the emperor’s illness, and was therefore come to sing to him of hope and trust,” Andersen wrote. “And as she sang, the shadows grew paler and paler; the blood in the emperor’s vein flowed more rapidly, and gave life to his weak limbs; and even Death himself listened and said ‘go on little nightingale, go on.’ ” Moved by the bird’s glorious song, Death takes a holiday and the emperor recovers.
It’s easy to understand why Andersen chose the nightingale. Its song is one of the bird world’s sweetest and most beloved; an older male—and in the bird world, the singers are almost exclusively male—may have more than two hundred fifty variations in his repertoire. And it’s one of the handful of birds that sing at night.
People have been intrigued and enchanted by the complex sounds that come out of tiny birds since the beginning of human time. And as the tools to study birdsong have vastly improved, the fascination has taken on new dimensions.
Erich Jarvis stands out in the world of birdsong research. An African American from Harlem, he was raised in a gritty neighborhood by a single mother and his grandparents. His father, who was mentally ill and homeless and lived in caves in New York City parks, was murdered in 1989. The crime was never solved. Tall and lithe, Jarvis was on track to become a professional dancer—he studied ballet at Manhattan’s renowned High School for the Performing Arts and was offered a position at the school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—when science lured him off the stage to a lab where he felt he could still be creative, but have more impact on the world. He is the only birdsong researcher I know who is attempting to transform a bird that cannot sing into one that does.
Jarvis, a former student of Fernando Nottebohm, is an associate professor of neurobiology at Rockefeller University in New York and was the leader of the consortium that renamed the architecture of the bird brain. These days he dances only as a pastime—“mostly salsa,” he says—and instead spends most of his time researching how birds learn to sing, and what that process can tell us about how the human brain learns. He has spent years deconstructing the song circuits of the bird brain to identify the tiniest elements of song at the genetic and cellular levels. By unpacking song learning at these most basic levels, he is casting a great deal of light on understanding the details of how the human brain learns, whether there’s a way to enhance it, or, if there is damage to the circuits, how it might be healed.
Zebra finches are the species of choice in Jarvis’s research. Wild birds’ brains are also used by scientists to study song learning. Call it extreme bird-watching: Jarvis sometimes goes into the field to gather up hummingbird brains, for instance, luring the birds to a feeder with sugar water. “They’ll find the food source, and in the morning, as part of the dawn chorus, they will sing next to it,” he says, which is how they lay claim to territory. Their singing activates a messenger molecule, and if their brain is removed and examined quickly enough, within half an hour—as humanely as possible, Jarvis says—he can find chemical traces of the song in the pathways along which those molecules traveled. Then he can measure changes in their brain activated by the birds’ singing.
Jarvis has some big dreams about applying his rarefied bird brain knowledge. His project has the potential to transform birds that have never sung a note in their life, such as pigeons, into virtuosos by engineering brand-new circuitry in their brain. Pigeons have the hardware to sing—a syrinx, the tiny structure just above the lungs that is the source of bird vocalization—as evidenced by their cooing, but they lack the software—neurons in the brain that would generate more sophisticated tunes. “I’ve rebranded myself as a neuroengineer,” he says. “If I can figure out how to induce a vocal learning circuit in the brain of a species like a pigeon and get it to learn how to sing like a songbird or imitate like a parrot, why, that would be my holy grail!”
The area of the brain that would be responsible for allowing a bird to develop song lies in the forebrain, which in a pigeon is about the size of a grape. Injecting new genes would, in essence, fertilize the song circuitry and create new axons in cells that would then connect to the motor neurons that control the fine movements of the syrinx.
If the technique proves successful—a big if, with plenty of technical hurdles to overcome—it may lead to a new era in repairing the human brain. “If we can figure it out in birds, we can figure out how to similarly repair circuits damaged in stroke and trauma in people,” Jarvis says, or discover new drugs that help people regain speech after a stroke, say, or find a cure for stuttering, a brain-based affliction that also occurs in some birds. The technique might also be able to patch up the malfunctioning circuitry of the autistic brain. “I am not sure I can do it in my lifetime, but I am going to try,” Jarvis says optimistically. “Maybe someday,” he adds with a laugh, “we could even engineer brain circuits for dancing.”
In the gray twilight of a windless dawn one morning in Oregon’s high desert, I watched several dozen male greater sage grouse strut their stuff. They are the dandies of the prairie bird world, wearing a giant boalike vest of white feathers and a broad spread fan of brown-and-white tail feathers. The air was thick with sexual tension, set to a soundtrack of their clucking and bubbling calls, along with a mysterious popping sound. The calls came from their syrinx, I knew, but I was not sure of the source of the popping. Finally, after glassing the birds in the growing light, I noticed two yellow, balloonlike air sacs emerging from their chests. During the dance, the cocks inflated the brightly colored sacs and slapped them together emphatically to make a sound that apparently mesmerizes the lady birds.
This sage grouse symphony is one of the bird world’s most dramatic courting rituals. It takes place on thousands of leks—small patches of grassy ground that are the main areas where sage birds congregate—across eleven western states each spring. Feathers fly as the males, who weigh up to seven pounds, clash to sort out their hierarchy, sometimes physically, but mostly with their elaborate displays. The aim of the rooster as he brashly sidles up to a hen is to catch her attention and impress her enough with his display to allow him to plant his seed. If the hen likes what she sees and hears, she turns her rear end toward the male, and, in a flurry of thrumming wings, the deed is done in a matter of seconds. To the victor go the spoils: The top cock mates with as many as three-quarters of the females.
What are these randy sage grouse saying with their twilight calls and slapping air sacs? A wide range of researchers are trying to decipher what birds are saying to one another and what they might be saying to us, especially songbirds. Intrigued that an animal so small can sing so sweetly and elaborately and communicate with its calls, researchers have made birdsong one of the most researched subjects in animal behavior.
And this research is not just about birds. Figuring out what they are saying may be key to understanding the animal world at large. “Even though I like birds and I study birds, I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about birds,” says Mike Webster, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds, which has cataloged and archived thousands of recorded birdsongs. “But what birds are saying to each other might be fundamental in some ways to what whales are saying to each other. Or frogs. Or other mammals. Including humans.” If we can learn to speak bird, “the most elaborate acoustic communication systems in the animal kingdom,” says Webster, we may be able to communicate with our fellow species, or at least understand what they are trying to tell us.
The ten thousand or so species of the world’s birds make just two categories of sounds: calls and songs. They communicate in other ways as well—through facial expressions, a range of eye movements, ruffling the feathers on their head, or simply rustling their wings or unfurling their tail feathers—but songs and calls seem to be the most favored methods. Calls are usually short and simple, while songs are longer and more complex. Calls are, for example, the caw of a raven, the cluck of a chicken, the quack of a duck, the screech of an owl, the honk of a goose, or the shriek of a hawk. Not all birdcalls are emitted by the syrinx; many are mechanical. Storks, for example, make loud clattering noises with their bills; hummingbirds emit a shrieking whistle with their tail feathers as a call to love when they dive during courtship; woodpeckers drum out their signature tattoo on a tree; and then, of course, there is the whacking of sage grouse man-boobs.
Some forty-five hundred of the ten thousand or so bird species in the world burst into some kind of song, and it is the Passeriformes, or birds whose four-toed feet are built for perching—three in the back, one in the front for a good grip—whose songs are most developed, especially the songbirds, which include thrushes, canaries, and warblers. In most species the songs come prewired; in just a few—parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds—their vocalizations are learned. The birds that learn to sing their song from their parents as babies are the ones that most interest scientists like Jarvis, for vocal learning is very rare in the animal word. While elephants, bats, and the cetaceans—whales and dolphins—also learn to express themselves with voice, their abilities are nowhere near as sophisticated as those of birds. “If you raise a bird in isolation, it grows up and doesn’t sound anything like its species,” says Steve Nowicki, an animal communication researcher at Duke University. “In fact it hardly sounds like a bird at all. If you raise baby birds in the lab, like a parent, feeding them every half hour from dawn till dusk, and play them songs, they can demonstrate with remarkable accuracy the specific songs you are playing that they have learned.”
That’s why in the Vogelsberg (literally, Bird Mountain) region of nineteenth-century Germany, foresters snatched young whistling bullfinches from their nests and taught the affectionate little guys to sing by whistling to them. They taught them not birdsongs but instead folk tunes and more complicated musical pieces, including Chopin’s “Thou Art So Like a Flower.” Some of the birds learned three different songs. It’s all the more remarkable because bullfinches don’t have much of a song of their own. The birds became a fashion of the time, an expensive one, and everyone from Queen Victoria to Tsar Nicholas II owned a whistling bullfinch.
Song learning in young nestlings has two phases. The sensory phase in the first weeks of life comes from hearing their father sing. After these tracks are laid down, nestlings move on to the sensorimotor phase, where they try out their own song using what they learned from Dad’s tune. They first vocalize a quiet “subsong,” bird nonsense and babble, really, just like the nonsense syllables of a human infant. With constant practice they progress to recognizable singing, but still not fully formed, something called “plastic song.” After two or three months, though, the bird has his own serious musical chops. And while a birdsong may seem fairly simple, when researchers slow it down they find that it is incredibly intricate and complex.
Each singing bird has a repertoire, which consists of different versions of a song, though some birds may have only a single song. One-fifth of singing birds have five or more songs. The North American brown thrasher has the largest repertoire of any bird, with as many as three thousand songs in its avian jukebox.
A Greek nymph known for her chaste ways gave the organ at the heart of birdsong its name. Syrinx was bathing along a river when the god Pan eyed her and made his move. As she fled, Syrinx encountered other river nymphs whom she begged for help to escape Pan’s embrace. Just as the lusty god reached her, the nymph was magically transformed into a tall stand of hollow reeds that played a haunting melody as Pan’s frustrated breath blew across their tops. Entranced with the tune, Pan cut the reeds down and fashioned them into his signature Pan pipes.
A bird’s syrinx is a very small but complex framework of bone and cartilage that supports the tissue that creates song. It works something like the reed in a clarinet. As the bird’s breath passes through it, the tiny membranes in the syrinx wall vibrate to create the song, and the bird adjusts the tension to change its tune. The more elaborate a bird’s array of syrinx muscles, the more complex songs it is able to produce. Birds keep singing by taking small and continuous breaths. By changing the position of its neck, throat, tongue, and beak, a bird can change the resonance of its tune.
The human equivalent of the syrinx is the voice box, or larynx. The larynx, though, is found at the top of the trachea, while the syrinx is at the bottom of the bird’s trachea, just before it splits in two above the lungs. This configuration allows birds to pass air from each lung lobe separately through the syrinx to create its extraordinarily complex melodies. Songbirds have the fastest-operating muscles in the animal kingdom. The muscles that control their syrinx operate a hundred times faster than the time it takes a human eye to blink.
Singing is mostly, though not entirely, the province of male birds, and it serves at least two critical purposes: It’s a signal to females about the reproductive vigor of the crooner—a healthy song indicates a healthy partner—as well as a warning to other males that this territory is defended. The territorial call is believed to be a proxy for bird battles, a way to conserve the energy that would be expended in a physical fight. As for the love song, after a few days of careful listening, female birds make their choice, hearing something about a male’s fitness in his voice. Perhaps it’s similar to the way some women swoon when they listen to Frank Sinatra or Robert Plant or Justin Bieber sing. And yes, size does matter. The size of the repertoire, that is. Females are far more willing to copulate with males that have larger song repertoires.
One of the still unanswered questions about birdsong is why birds sing. Is it only about sex and territory, or are there other reasons? For pleasure, perhaps? Or do birds sing for reasons that lie beyond our understanding? The mythical thorn bird, as the Celts told it, never sang a note; it simply searched its entire life for the sharpest thorn. When it found that perfect thorn, it impaled itself on it, singing, as it died, the sweetest song ever heard. Ofer Tchernichovski, who studies vocal learning in birds at Hunter College in New York, believes they sing for more than practical reasons. He tells a story about seeing a robin on a subway platform that appeared to be ill, possibly dying. Nonetheless, the nearly motionless bird was focused intently on singing what might have been its last song. “It was kind of touching,” the scientist says. “He was definitely focused on singing, even though the song was not directed at anyone. It’s as if the bird was somehow comforting itself. It seemed to be more encouraged, even in sickness, by its singing.”
Taken as a whole, the world’s collection of birdsong is an astounding natural symphony, a global treasure of tunes, each one the product of millions of years of evolution, each telling a complex story about that bird and its relationship to others and to its home. And scientists have only begun to unpack those stories. Unfortunately, birdsongs are changing and disappearing as the natural world is altered and destroyed and the human dimension grows noisier and more invasive. That’s why the Macaulay Library serves as a kind of Noah’s ark, keeping copies of its recorded birdsong collection stashed in a limestone cave for safekeeping.
The absolute peak of the phenomenon of birdsong is the dawn chorus. Just as the sun is starting to rise, especially during mating season in the spring, songbirds across the planet create the world’s premier aural spectacle. Because the early morning air is usually still, a song broadcast at dawn is some twenty times more effective as a way to communicate than at other times of the day. One can imagine the exuberant ripple of trills that erupts as the leading edge of sunrise slowly moves across the planet. “Nature’s daily miracle,” as it’s known, is even a holiday—May 5 is International Dawn Chorus Day, when people rise in the darkness and head out on treks to be present at the bird world’s first musical stirrings.
There are superstars among the world’s singing birds. The hermit thrush sings forty-five to a hundred different notes, with fifty changes in pitch. The aptly named superb lyrebird, an Australian ground nester with an elaborate plumed tail, has the most sophisticated song. Its syrinx features are the most elaborate, which make its tune inordinately complex and give it what is believed to be the loudest birdcall. Moreover, along with seven elements of its own song, it mixes in samples of other birds’ songs, along with mimicry of such things as koala grunts or screeches, and even human-created sounds such as sirens, crying babies, and, ironically, the radios and chainsaws of loggers who have come to destroy their habitat.
The sedge warbler, which migrates among Africa, Europe, and Asia, has fifty or so separate pieces to its chattering song, including snippets of mimicry from more than seventy other bird species. A male may never repeat the same song during the course of its life.
The large nocturnal kakapo of New Zealand—whose name is Maori for “parrot of the night”—sucks in air with a shrill whistling sound to fill its two football-size lung sacs, which it then releases in a loud, low-frequency boom. Its song broadcasts more than three miles, a feat the kakapo accomplishes with a natural amplifier: an amphitheater-like bowl that it scoops out of the earth and then positions itself in for maximum acoustic effect. The males may do this every night for months to lure a partner. Unfortunately, night parrots are in steep decline. Once upon a time, kakapo were found everywhere in New Zealand. An early explorer described them as surrounding his camp, “screaming and yelling like a lot of demons” in the night. Now just 126 of these birds remain, and they are under intense management to keep them extant.
Other superstars of the bird-singing world are the male and female plain-tailed wrens, which live high in the Andes, where they flit among the slender green stalks of bamboo forests and sing a unique cooperative duet. The pair take turns rapidly producing notes, three to six per second, and they sing so perfectly in synchrony that the song sounds as if it’s coming from a single bird.
It’s not only singing that intrigues researchers. Chickadees ostensibly invented social media a long time ago, their very own kind of Twitter, compact bursts of information shared back and forth. Chickadee language—both calls and song—is the most sophisticated animal language in the world, and scientists have spent decades studying it. Cracking the little bird’s code will not only tell us more about what they are yammering on about as they hop along the sidewalk and through the bushes; it could also tell us a great deal about ourselves. The chickadee “is a window into the evolution of our own language and our society,” says Jeff Lucas, of Purdue University, who has spent decades deciphering the bird’s calls.
The black-capped chickadee is ubiquitous in the northern half of North America. Like most birds, the family Paridae, which includes chickadees, tits, and titmice, have two songs, one that expresses territoriality and another that seduces. It’s the separate chickadee call system, however, that is unlike that of any other species, and it arises from their unique social structure. Chickadees form pairs in the spring, though once they finish mating they gather to hang out in flocks of anywhere from two to fifty birds. As this tiny tribe hops through the brush, they chitchat with their flockmates, possibly telling of food they found, saying “I am over here,” or sounding the alarm if an owl is spotted.
Chickadees can be remarkably specific. The more fearsome a predator to the chickadees, for example, the more dees at the end of their alarm cry. The pygmy owl, a small, fierce, and agile predator that loves to gobble up the birds, causes them to add up to twenty-three extra dees on the end of their cry. The great gray owl, a bird that is far larger than a pygmy owl but which seldom eats chickadees and thus is less of a threat, earned only an extra half a dee. Alarm calls, then, are not about the size of the bird posing the threat but about the size of the threat. Such specificity was once thought to be solely the province of human language. “Their social system selects for an immense amount of information transfer,” says Lucas, “which in turn selects for an extraordinarily complex call system.”
The Carolina chickadees Lucas studies have six note types. The extraordinary part is that they consistently combine and recombine these notes, similar to the way humans organize phonemes to make new words and sentences. That means that the birds understand syntax, and that they have rules of chickadee grammar for their sentences. The calls vary greatly, Lucas says, “from really short calls to ridiculously long calls with up to fifty notes in them.” Moreover, the possible recombination of notes and the number of calls they make to each other seem limitless, which is a clue to its sophistication—open-endedness being a defining feature of human language.
Chickadee lingo seems to be nearly universal, a kind of Esperanto of the animal world. “If you record a chickadee here in Montana calling out about a predator and play it in Japan, the birds will all go like this,” says Erick Greene, a biology professor who researches bird communication at the University of Montana, cowering and looking up nervously. “And it’s not just birds that respond,” he says, but “squirrels and chipmunks as well.”
Beyond the obvious things—food, predators, seduction, and the like—what else might a chickadee be going on about? The weather? The role of the chickadee in the universal order? “In thirty years I bet we’re having a completely different conversation,” says Lucas, “because we are slowly getting a feeling for how amazing these creatures are.” Nowicki, though, has his doubts about the loftiness of chickadee chat. “Personally, I don’t think they are reciting Shakespeare,” he says.
While we can’t converse with birds in their lingua franca yet, birds can be taught to speak with people. The most famous bird communicator was Alex, an African gray parrot who was owned by a researcher named Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Brandeis and Harvard. Alex was unusually brilliant, even for a gray parrot. (Parrots are another bird that researchers think may have a mind.) Alex’s speaking abilities revolutionized the way people regarded bird intelligence. He didn’t just “parrot” what people said, he possessed a vocabulary of more than a hundred words, which he could put into the appropriate categories and which he could use to express himself. He even made up his own words, for example, giving an apple the name “banerry”—a combination of two other fruits he knew, banana and cherry. Alex died on September 6, 2007, at the ripe old age of thirty-one. His last words to Pepperberg as she left the lab that night, as always, were “You be good. See you tomorrow. I love you.”
Linguists have also been helped by the chattering bird class. One current notion is that while early humans used a grunt language similar to that of apes, they blended those grunts together in a structure very similar to the phrasing of birdsong, which created a milestone in evolution: human speech. Our speech has two parts, a lexical layer, or the meaning of a sentence, and an expression layer. Take the sentence “Tom ate an apple.” The meaning of the individual words is always the same. The expression layer arranges and rearranges the grunts in different ways to say different things, in the same way birds rearrange their notes to sing different songs with different meanings. “Tom ate an apple!” has nearly the same words as “Is Tom eating an apple?” but in a different order and different expression, giving each sentence a different meaning.
Something may be hardwired in us to hear and be deeply moved at fundamental levels by the ubiquitous music of birds. I am moved when I hear the trill of a meadowlark in the meadow near my house. In birdsong, as in birds’ flight, I experience some of the lightness of being we so crave. The romantic poet John Keats wrote of his passionate love for birdsong in “Ode to a Nightingale,” seeing it as nothing less than an expression of immortality—“pouring forth thy soul abroad in such ecstasy!” he wrote. Percy Bysshe Shelley in “To a Skylark” waxes rhapsodic about birdsong as an emanation from heaven, a balm to escape the pain of life:
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine;
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
Birdsong has inspired a wide range of music, from Boccherini’s The Aviary to Mussorgsky’s “Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells” to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Vivaldi’s Spring. Mozart borrowed notes from the song of a starling he kept, and when it died he was so broken up that he threw the bird an elaborate funeral. And the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are remarkably similar to the song of the white-breasted wood wren.
The most devoted of the birdsong composers was Olivier Messiaen, the mid-twentieth-century avant-garde musician for whom birds were the pinnacle of musicality and an expression of the spiritual. “They are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs,” he said. Messiaen had a nervous system anomaly called synesthesia that, in his case, was bidirectional—that is, he “saw” music in his mind represented as beautiful swaths of color, and he “heard” color as music. A walk through the woods watching and listening to the birds, then, must have been quite a treat for the Frenchman.
Messiaen was as much an ornithologist as a composer, and he traveled the world listening to a wide range of exotic birds and then writing pieces based on their songs. He didn’t just replicate their music, he also worked the singing into complex and atmospheric tone poems. He quietly strolled through the woods in the French Alps where he lived, or through the exotic bird markets of Paris, scribbling the notes of hundreds of different birds of the same species, to create a composite and ideal warbler, for example. His first birdsong piece was Oiseaux Exotiques (Exotic Birds), and it is considered a landmark piece for its precise use of birdsong. Another composition for the flute, called Le Merle Noir, was based entirely on the songs of the blackbird, which Messiaen felt had the sweetest tune of all.
Why does birdsong affect us so? The male’s song is shown to increase dopamine, a pleasure chemical, in female birds; perhaps it triggers a cascade of reward neurochemicals in us as well.
A number of businesses sell the sound of birds for its purported psychological benefit and ability to boost productivity. Julian Treasure runs the Sound Agency, selling companies on the idea that a birdcall is part of our deep past and so has a profound impact on productivity, encouraging a state called “body relaxed, mind alert.” “People find birdsong relaxing and reassuring because over thousands of years they have learned when the birds sing, they are safe,” Treasure told Denise Winterman of BBC News. “It’s when birds stop singing that people need to worry,” because their silence may mean danger is nearby. “Birdsong is also nature’s alarm clock, with the dawn chorus signaling the start of the day, so it stimulates us cognitively.”
A persistent notion runs through some of the world’s esoteric traditions that holds that in the distant past, birdsong was a universal language understood by humans and birds alike. Precisely what this language might have been is hard to tell, for there isn’t much to go on, just a smattering of oblique clues in several different texts. In Sufism’s mystical poem Conference of the Birds, Attar the Chemist describes such a language, and in the Talmud, Solomon’s wisdom is said to come from the birds. In the collection of anonymous Norse poetry known as the Poetic Edda, Sigurd, a legendary hero of Norse mythology, tastes dragon blood, and it allows him to understand bird language. In the Kabbalah it is known as the secret and perfect language.
Mythology holds that Hugin and Munin, the ravens who sat on the shoulders of the Norse god Odin and were his eyes and ears in the world, reported to him in this language. Birds, some say, used this language to talk to humans initiated in spiritual matters and vice versa. Shamans are said to speak it in their trance states to communicate with birds and other animals. According to a paper published in the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition in 2003 by the scholar Vincent Bridges, Jesus and other ancient mystics were purported to have had command of this secret bird language. Saint Francis of Assisi, the twelfth-century Catholic friar who believed nature mirrored the divine, was conversant in the language of animals, preaching often to “his sisters, the birds,” who were said to be enchanted by the sound of his voice.
Cyrano de Bergerac wrote about a traveler who encountered a brightly colored bird wearing a golden crown. The bird sang to the traveler, who was surprised to find he could understand bird language. “There are to be found among the birds those who can speak and understand your own language,” the bird in Bergerac’s tale sings. “Thus, just as you will encounter birds that do not say a word, others that merely twitter and others that can speak, so you may even encounter one of the most perfect birds of all—those who use all idioms.”
According to Bergerac, the cathedral-building Freemasons were among those who spoke in the rhythmic language of the birds and camouflaged the esoteric language within their everyday conversation so that it was clear only to those who understood it. “What unsuspected marvels we should find,” he wrote, “if we knew how to dissect words, to strip them of their bark and liberate their spirit, the divine line, which is within.”
Bergerac’s belief echoes the theory of scholars of the esoteric such as Vincent Bridges and the French alchemist and author Fulcanelli, who believe bird language is a phonetic kabbalah whose sounds are alchemical, a divine spark that somehow activates human DNA to evoke and maintain a spiritual awareness in which the language of the birds can then be understood. “The language of the birds,” writes Fulcanelli, “is the common language of initiation and illumination behind cultural expressions as different as the Christian, the Inca, the medieval troubadours and ancient Greeks. And traces of it can be found in the dialects of Picardy and Provence, and most important of all, in the language of the Gypsies.”
Climate change looms as the biggest threat to birdsong. In a grim, illustrative 2012 piece called When Birds Sing a Toxic Sky, the London performance artist Liam Young placed eighty birds in a sealed room in Amsterdam. Wearing a gas mask, he opened the valve on a tank of carbon dioxide and slowly raised the level inside the room from 360 parts per million, around where we were then, up to 1,000 ppm, which is the level the earth is predicted to reach by the end of the century. At first the birds sang merrily away, but as the levels rose, the singing slowed, rhythms were altered, and finally the singing stopped entirely. The birds didn’t die, they simply stopped singing.
Do birds have more to tell us about the world and ourselves than we know? Are we simply unable to comprehend their vital messages because we have lost the knowledge? Can we regain it? The answer seems to be yes—if we keep them around to find out.