One morning, after Josephine had talked her way into our bed—then spent the rest of the night rotating through a series of improbable sleeping positions—as we lay clinging to the last shreds of sleep, she asked why the birds were singing so loudly. I’ve grown so accustomed to the morning chorus of birds outside our window that I hadn’t noticed, but yes, they were rather loud.
“What are they saying?” she asked. “Why are they all tweet-twee-tweet?”
I considered this. Was there an answer to this question? Why do birds wake so early to talk to one another? And was it possible to divine the meaning of their songs?
There are scientists who think that birds sing at first light to signal that they have survived the night and are laying claim to their territory for another day. Others suggest that they sing in the time after waking when it’s still too dark to forage. I think both of these hypotheses can be combined with the one I find most compelling: They hash out their territorial rights when they first wake up, because it’s the time when there’s the least competition for the acoustic airspace. As I was researching this question I stumbled upon the story of the Talbots, a family living in southwest England, that demonstrated the point. I found and friended Ali Talbot on Facebook. A few days later I was chatting on the phone with her husband, Nathan. He laid out the story for me.
Every morning at 5:00 a.m., they would hear the siren. The Talbots live near a hospital, so sirens aren’t unusual, but this one was peculiar. Instead of sweeping by, it stayed put, as if the source was parked in their backyard. “The hospital is about half a mile from my house, so at first I thought it was an ambulance,” Nathan Talbot told me. “It woke me up every single day at 5:00 a.m. It was uncanny! It was like an alarm clock.” It cycled through the typical phases, sometimes stopping just long enough to make them think it was finished before starting again. And it happened every morning at the same time. Sometimes it would sound like the ringtone of a cell phone that never went to voicemail. Sometimes it sounded just like a car alarm. But there was something strange about it: Though the volume was just as jarring as sirens normally are, the timbre was slightly higher and thinner, more of a whistle than a siren. Eventually Nathan went out into his garden and sighted the culprit: a blackbird. It was perched right above his dormer window.
Wild birds all over the world have changed their tunes as the noises associated with people dominate cities. Most of these changes don’t involve mimicry—the blackbird in the Talbots’ yard was exceptional. Instead, birds are shifting their songs in order to compete with humanity’s hubbub, so they can be heard. In places where the morning commute creates tumult, birds have set their alarms earlier: Long before first light, they sing to declare the boundaries of their territories. If shifting their schedule is impractical, birds sometimes shift pitch instead, adjusting their vocal register up or down so they aren’t in competition with the buzz of engines.
One of the first people to realize that animals were listening to the songs of other species and adjusting their own songs to accommodate them was Bernie Krause, a musician turned natural-sound engineer. Krause was recording in Kenya’s Maasai Mara National Reserve when he had his epiphany. It was hours after midnight, and he was listening to the sounds of the reserves while drifting between wakefulness and sleep. “It was in that semifloating state—that transition between the blissful suspension of awareness and the depths of total unconsciousness—that I first encountered the transparent weave of creature voices not only as a choir but as a cohesive sonic event,” Krause wrote in his book The Great Animal Orchestra. “No longer a cacophony, it became a partitioned collection of vocal organisms—a highly orchestrated acoustic arrangement of insects, spotted hyenas, eagle-owls, African wood-owls, elephants, tree hyrax, distant lions, and several knots of tree frogs and toads. Every distinct voice seemed to fit within its own acoustic bandwidth.”
Put simply, each creature was filling a special place in the sonic spectrum, some of them the higher registers, others the lower. If this were a visual phenomenon rather than auditory, every species’ song would have been a different color of the rainbow, each one stacked above the next. When Krause printed out a visual spectrogram of his recording, it looked to him like musical notation: Each animal fit into its own track, where it wouldn’t overlap with and be muddied by the sounds of another. In a very real way, the animals were an orchestra: Each instrument made itself heard by producing a different set of frequencies. The elephants were the bass cellos, the hyenas the oboes, the hyraxes the clarinets, the insects the violins, and the bats the piccolos over the top.
In cities, however, a constant wash of mechanical noise fills a massive swath of the audio spectrum. Birds have adjusted, but there’s only so much they can change in what is in evolutionary terms—a short period of time. House sparrows are declining in some areas because, scientists suspect, they can’t communicate with one another. Some species of bat, which rely on echolocation to hunt, have moved out of noisy areas. And, of course, the problem isn’t limited to cities: Ship engine noise and the other sounds people make in the oceans can have deleterious effects on dolphins and whales.
All the noise is bad for animals, and for us. Constant exposure to mechanical noise is unpleasant, and there’s some evidence that it can chronically elevate stress and erode our health. One of its gravest effects may be the separation of humans from the orchestra of life. We’d be much more likely to quiet down if we were interested in listening to what our nonhuman neighbors were telling us—that is, if we all learned to speak the language of birds.
It turns out that learning to understand the bird language doesn’t require a magical amulet or an enchanted silver seashell, but instead something that’s arguably more difficult to come by: patience. When I picked up Jon Young’s book What the Robin Knows, I was a little worried I was about to waste my time trying to acquire occult knowledge. But as I read, I became impressed by the modesty of Young’s claims. He states the facts without embellishment, and offers a skill for the price of forced concentration.
I’d thought I’d start learning to identify birds by their songs, but Young admits that is sometimes impossible. He writes, “Even aces can have trouble identifying a new species on the basis of song alone.” Songs vary across the country, and across the yard. A Bewick’s wren may sing different songs than its father does a few hundred yards away. Instead of obsessing over species identification, Young focuses on the salient landmarks in bird dialect, and on the way they correlate with behavior. He doesn’t try to recognize and read each trill and semiquaver for literal meaning. Instead, Young listens for the emotion and the intent behind the song. You’ve already done this, he points out, if you’ve ever listened to someone singing in a language you don’t understand: “Listening to Spanish, Italian, or German opera, you, like me, may have no idea what the words of a particular aria mean, but you don’t need this knowledge to understand the feeling they convey. You can tell if it’s a song of pleasure, jubilation, triumph, or tragedy.”
I found that if I focused on the birdsong, I could easily hear singing and scolding and—perhaps the most revealing sound-scape of all—silence. While reading Young’s book I couldn’t help but begin to notice the bird noises outside my window: peeps and chirps. It was a warm winter day, so I went out to the backyard to sit in the sun. As I was reading, monitoring the birdsong around me with a sliver of my attention, the chirping ceased. It was a subtle change, one I wouldn’t have noticed normally. The other sounds still continued, of course—the cars passing, the shouts of children at the nearby playground—but the underlying fabric of birdsong had disappeared, like a tablecloth whisked away from under the place settings with such delicacy that I would have missed it if I hadn’t been listening for it. I climbed the steps to my back door and stood on my toes to look over the fence. There were about a dozen students walking east on the greenway that borders my house. They were holding hands, forming a cordon that swept across the park. I felt a little shiver of triumph. The birds had told me that something was happening, and I had been ready to hear.
Young’s method for learning bird language is simple: Find a spot and go there every day to watch and listen to birds. Though I had experienced my first triumph on that winter morning, I had actually been doing it wrong. First, I was reading, rather than giving my full attention to the birds, and second, my backyard is barely big enough for one little raised vegetable bed, and a high wooden fence surrounds it. I could hear the birds, but I couldn’t see them, so I couldn’t connect sounds to behavior.
As you learn bird language, a new world is supposed to open up to you. Young tells the story of a teenager he calls Jack, who immediately tired of the lessons. After sitting alone in his spot, Jack told Young that there weren’t any birds around. But over the course of the school year, Young writes:
“no birds” became “a few birds,” which morphed into “some little brown noisy birds,” then into “flocks of little black and white ones that stayed in the trees” and “other birds I couldn’t really see.” One day Jack announced he had seen “some Pacific wrens” (those “little brown noisy birds”) and some “chickadees in the trees” (those “little black and white ones”). . . . Then “the Pacific wren seemed upset because another Pacific wren came close to this one’s favorite stump.”
In one sense this was a modest change: Jack learned the names of a couple of species and came to understand what they were doing. But in another sense, he gained a superpower. He went from not seeing anything to recognizing individual birds and perceiving the invisible outlines of their territories. This isn’t useful by the normal measures of humans—it’s not going to make Jack money or get him a girlfriend—but it does provide a sense of a place. What’s true of other people is also true of places: to know deeply is to love more. To know the secrets of a place, to read it on many levels, and to sense the vastness of the unknown is, I think, the key to love.
It was a cool February morning, still damp with dew. Brown birds were hopping around under the live oaks across the street. I sat on my stoop doing my time, watching as Young had instructed. I felt good. This seemed like the right way to learn birdsongs: Observe the birds and connect them to their songs naturally. It was much more doable than trying to memorize a series of notes from a recording.
While I watched, a pair of birds foraging on my neighbor’s driveway protested in mild distress and surged upward, into the trees. They might been frightened by a predator, but I hadn’t seen enough to feel the slightest confidence in that conclusion. In the dense canopy of one oak, a bird was chirping more and more loudly, like a parent yelling at a toddler who isn’t listening. But I had no clue what was going on.
There was birdsong all around me, but which birds were producing it? A pair of black dots flitted across the sky and were gone. Birds, I assumed.
I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Maybe I need to get binoculars, I thought, but what would my neighbors think if they saw me sitting on my stoop, scanning our tiny street with binoculars?
Spend enough time studying bird language, Young writes, and you’ll be freaking out your friends by announcing that a cat is coming just before it appears.
“Birds have always been messengers,” Young says. “They’ve always brought us messages about the safety of the land around us.”
There’s nothing mystical about this: birds are just always spewing out information. They create a sort of sonic Internet. All sorts of animals tune in to this exchange of data, alert for ripples of disturbance, sometimes adding their own contributions, sometimes manipulating the chatter in their own favor.
Young identifies five types of bird noises: baseline songs, companion calls, territorial squabbles, juvenile begging, and alarms. When I began sitting and watching birds, I heard mostly companion calls, with songs and the occasional alarm thrown in. Companion calls are simple chirps back and forth (“You good?” “Yep. You?”). I wasn’t hearing many songs, I think, because it was still winter, too early for nesting. Songs generally advertise the boundaries of territories, those three-dimensional spaces individual birds claim as their own. When these property lines are well established, Young writes, you can see an obvious change when a bird crosses over. A robin that is cocky on his own turf will become furtive when he slips into a neighbor’s property.
Of all the signals the birds were sending, the alarms were the most interesting to me because they indicated the detection of something beyond my visual field. The shape of a disturbance often allows an experienced bird interpreter to decipher what sort of creature is triggering an alert. A predator on the wing creates a “wave of alarms, followed by a tunnel of silence,” Young writes. A strolling cat causes birds to “hook” up to a slightly higher perch while also broadcasting a mild alarm. A human blundering through acts as a “bird plow,” oblivious to all they are flushing out of their path.
Young tells one story of watching Pacific wrens sound the alarm as something moved through a salmonberry thicket near his house outside Seattle: The birds would scold vigorously, then stop, peer into the bushes, and scold again. Young concluded that there was a weasel among the salmonberries, disappearing and then reappearing in another spot. This is a classic weasel pattern. Weasels are elusive predators that can vanish into rodent holes and slip beneath dead sticks and leaves, only to pop up in a new place.
Young had just moved from New Jersey, so he asked a local who helped take care of the land if there were weasels around. The man assured him there were not. Young was puzzled, until he began to find other indisputable signs: road-killed weasels, and a nest of baby weasels in a Volkswagen behind his house. The weasels were there all right, they were just too sneaky for human eyes. But Young could see them through the birds.
I was having trouble seeing the birds at all, let alone detecting more stealthy beasts from their movements. I swallowed my sense of neighborly decorum and, one Sunday, took Josephine to a sporting goods store to buy a pair of binoculars. I found some I liked for just under $100; they had the right magnification, but not all the high-tech materials. As soon as we got home Josephine insisted that she should have right to their exclusive use. I tightened the strap around her neck and made her promise to be careful with them, and to keep her fingers off the lenses. They were comically large when she pressed them to her little face. She gazed at the sky, at her feet, at the trees, and then she turned the binoculars around the wrong way and repeated the sequence.
I got my chance to use the binoculars after leaving Josephine at daycare the next day. It took me a while to master the focusing wheel, but once I did, I began seeing birds with remarkable clarity. The sun was fiercely bright and a little black bird was swooping toward the grass, then back up into the trees. It would perch, then swoop down, making acrobatic midair turns. Through the binoculars I could see this bird was dressed in a tuxedo and a starched white shirt, with fluffy feathers on its black head. When I went to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bird Guide Web site, I spotted it right away: a black phoebe. It’s a fly-catching bird, which explains the acrobatics. I felt momentarily triumphant, but overall I was frustrated. This bird-watching thing was hard, harder than watching snails or trees, I mused resentfully.
That night I called up Mike Nelson, a friend of my brother’s and an amateur naturalist who had offered to give me pointers. He assured me that I wasn’t going blind, and that binoculars really are helpful, even for birds just across the street. As a kid, he told me, he had a very short list of the birds he’d seen until he got binoculars. Then, he said, “all of a sudden I was like, ‘Holy crap, I just found six more species, all in my backyard.’”
Mike also told me to stop beating myself up over failing to connect songs to specific birds. Just watching and listening probably wouldn’t do the trick, he said, because I’d also be surrounded by the songs of unseen birds. And he thought learning from a book would be just as hard: “If you try and read about it in a guidebook, it will say something like, ‘twitch-twitch-twitch rising on the third note and then alternating with a wheezy buzz.’ Good luck remembering that!” The way to do it, he said, was to hang out with someone who knew the sounds and let that person teach me.
His method was to listen to the birdsongs and link them to a story or image as a mnemonic. “So a wrentit, for instance, is like a lifeguard getting progressively more angry, blowing on its whistle. Or there’s the common yellowthroat, which has a call that sounds like whichisit-whichisit. It’s yellow with what looks a little like a black mask, so I imagine that it’s a frightened thief running into a museum and trying to figure out what to steal: whichisit-whichisit-whichisit!”
Mike suggested I learn a few of the most common birds first to get my bearings, and promised to send me a list.
I’d love to be able to recognize every bird by its song (Mike knows them well enough to stop whenever he hears something he doesn’t recognize), but I’d settle for simply having a better grasp of my surroundings. I’d like push notifications on my phone that tell me when each bird arrives in spring, and how they are doing with nesting and finding food. Bird language provides those notifications—it’s the original social network. Young uses a different metaphor: “Nervousness among robins flocking in the winter,” Young writes, “is a great barometer of neighborhood tension.” If I can’t have notifications, a barometer will do just fine.
The most basic readings from this barometer tell a story of lucky coincidence and adaptation. The most common birds we see today are the ones that found they could thrive in the environments humans created. Nighthawks nest on gravel rooftops and chimney swifts rely on human-made structures (notably chimneys), while house sparrows nest under eaves. Mown lawns produce an earthworm buffet for crows and robins, and house sparrows travel to highway rest stops to eat the bugs splattered on car windshields.
Young is careful to talk about birds that live near people, like robins and house finches and song sparrows. He suggests finding an observation spot that’s immediately at hand—certainly not a place you have to drive to, and ideally one that’s no more than a few minutes’ walk away. There’s no need to seek out untouched wilderness, because the bird closest at hand is the best teacher. And a city bird teaches more than its language.
Often when I’m working, I’ll have several windows open on my computer at once: I’m chatting with half a dozen colleagues in one window and monitoring what people are saying about my latest piece on another, while also responding to e-mails and fielding phone calls. Sometimes my mind snaps under all this stimulation and I enter a sort of fugue state in which I manically click from one window to another without accomplishing anything. It’s hard to break out of this; the feeling is remarkably similar to the sense of being powerless to stop eating spoonful after spoonful of ice cream.
But I’ve found that spending five minutes watching birds on my front stoop is a reliable cure for this frenzy. I come away calmer. I think more clearly afterward. I suspect this is because watching the birds allows me to exercise a very different part of my brain. Instead of receiving hundreds of digital jolts coming in from the outside, all specifically directed at me, me, me!, I’m reaching outward. I’m trying to empathize with another species, understand their culture. Instead of being at the focal point of a million strands of information, I am an outsider trying to connect. This not only feels healthy, it also feels more honest than my online existence. There’s much more to life than existing as a node in the information web.
It’s not that nature doesn’t send the equivalent of status updates directly to me, it’s that normally I’m just oblivious to them. I’m only just beginning to notice when it’s me the birds are talking about. Whenever I tune in to bird language, I begin to feel the reality of interdependence. It’s like a chiropractic adjustment for the brain.
As promised, Mike sent me a list of birds to learn. I had been expecting a literal list of names, but instead he created a multimedia document with photos, recordings of songs, and his favorite factoids. Anna’s hummingbirds steal insects from spiders and use their webs “to hold their shot-glass-sized nests together.” House finches, whose red-tinted heads I’d just learned to see, have a jumbled warble that often ends “with an upward slur, which makes them sound like they are saying: blah-blahblah-blah-blah-RIGHT?” Some of the hidden birds I’d heard singing in the bushes turned out to be hermit thrushes, furtive relatives of robins. And you can identify a robin’s song, Mike wrote, by listening for a cadence that sounds like cheerily–cheer up–cheer up–cheerily–cheer up.
I was learning, but slowly. I’d figure out the names of half a dozen birds on one day, only to forget them the next. Josephine, curiously, was much better at remembering names than I was.
“What is that bird?” I’d ask. “With the white stripe over its eye and the upturned tail?”
“Um, is it a Bewick’s wren?” she’d answer, correctly.
The decline in my powers of retention was distressing, but predicable. The young mind is calibrated for absorption: Josephine was learning new words every day, so it’s no surprise that she could learn birds. Mike also had started learning young. At my age, without extraordinary effort, I might never become fluent in bird language. Josephine has the chance, but not necessarily the inclination. She’s curious about birds, but she’s much more curious about ballerinas. That’s fine with me: I just want her to have the opportunity.
Birdsong is just one of the millions of signals that most humans ignore on a regular basis. We can’t pay attention to everything—that would be maddening—so we pick and choose. But the point is that often we don’t choose: We listen, by default, to the voices in our heads rather than the voices of our avian neighbors. I find that I’m happier when I listen to the world rather than to the whining of my doubts.
If we started listening to birds, perhaps we’d get a little quieter (it’s hard to listen while making noise) in ways that would benefit both birds and humans. We’d probably be both happier and healthier. But even more interesting, in my view, is that we’d begin to perceive an unseen world of gossip and warfare and love all around us. And if we understood this language, I think we’d make different choices: not to stop building and living, but just to be a little more thoughtful in the way that we live.