Why Birds Sing
A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song

By David Rothenberg

258 pages
Cloth $26

Basic Books
Publication date: April 2005

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 Why Birds Sing 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 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. Along the way he reveals some wonderful facts: Brown thrashers sing more than 2,000 songs, the largest repertoire of any bird, and brown-headed cowbirds have the greatest frequency range (low to high notes). Starlings are masterful mimics; Mozart so loved his pet starling that when the bird died he staged a funeral. The most detailed study of any bird song is a 200-page book on the wood pewee, whose musical output consists of little more than three notes. Meanwhile, the song of the American robin still awaits detailed study. Eighteenth-century Europeans used wind instruments, especially the recorder, to “teach” caged birds how to sing. In our vocal-learning abilities, we are closer to birds than we are to apes—nonhuman primates cannot learn to sing.

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, the journalist and screenwriter, 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, 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.” —RW

The Ghost with Trembling Wings
By Scott Weidensaul

352 pages
7 illustrations, 8 maps
Paperback $15
North Point Press
Publication date: June 2003

In The Ghost with Trembling Wings, Scott Weidensaul lives the dream of many birders. He searches the humid mountains of St. Lucia for the small, drab Semper’s warbler—presumably extinct but perhaps overlooked. He braves the mosquitoes, snakes, heat, and sloughs of Louisiana’s Pearl River Wildlife Management Area, drawn there, like so many before him, by a hunter’s claimed sighting (on April Fool’s Day in 1999) of America’s most famous “ghost bird,” the ivory-billed woodpecker.

In the western reaches of Brazil’s Mato Grosso, a state half again as large as Texas, he tries for the cone-billed tanager. Known from a single specimen shot in the 1930s, it, too, is thought to be extinct, yet Mato Grosso is vast, and its bird life is not well documented, so maybe the six-inch tanager hangs on.

Weidensaul’s book chronicles the nearly two years he has spent “following the faint track of lost animals”—mainly birds and mammals—that refuse to disappear, even though many are considered extinct. Some probably exist only in the minds of wishful thinkers, but enough have popped up to give Weidensaul and others (including respected scientists) hope that the extinction label is not necessarily forever.

Leaving the “bruised” mountains of his home in the Pennsylvania Appalachians, where his studies focus on hawks and owls, Weidensaul goes as far as Tasmania, hunting ground of the strange thylacine. The last thylacine, a zoo animal, died in 1936, but no one can say for sure that the species is gone. Unconfirmed sightings of this 65-pound predatory marsupial—shaped like a dog and striped on its hindquarters like a zebra—have persisted. The most credible was in 1982, when a forest ranger in northwest Tasmania claims to have caught a thylacine in his truck’s headlights.

Even if the thylacine is extinct, it may yet be recreated—so say officials at the Australia Museum, which in 1999 announced a controversial plan to clone a thylacine using DNA from a baby taken from its mother’s pouch and preserved in a jar of alcohol for more than a century. Weidensaul did some scrambling through the mountainous forests of Tasmania’s Western Tiers in search of a living thylacine, his effort more a tribute to the phantom “Tasmanian tiger” than an attempt to prove its existence.

Such fieldwork seems to be Weidensaul’s preferred way of gathering material—he also traveled widely for Living on the Wind, his Pulitzer-nominated 1999 book on bird migration. He can, however, comb the literature and interview experts with the best of them, and in The Ghost with Trembling Wings, his research confirms that some animals have veritably risen from extinction.

He tells the story, for example, of an ornithologist who picked up a road-killed Australian night parrot in a remote part of Queensland in 1990—the first specimen to materialize since 1912. Although there haven’t been any confirmed sightings of living night parrots, which are strictly nocturnal, in nearly a century, “no one,” says Weidensaul, “seriously believes the species is extinct.”

It’s not only presumably extinct species that fascinate Weidensaul. He also writes about the nearly extinct, such as North America’s black-footed ferret, and the extirpated, such as the cougar, now largely absent from the eastern United States. (Although he dismisses most cougar reports in the East as wishful thinking, he’s not above wishing that the big cat would return to his Pennsylvania hills.) Weidensaul even devotes a chapter to “cryptids” such as the Loch Ness Monster, delicately balancing skepticism and sensitivity.

Throughout The Ghost with Trembling Wings, Weidensaul interweaves history, science, and personal experience as he shifts between species, settings, and time periods. Somehow, he makes almost all of these transitions smoothly.

The book’s best parts come when Weidensaul, turning from reporter to participant, describes his field work—his squalid quarters in St. Lucia, the Pearl River Wildlife Management Area’s “paradoxical mix of accessibility and remoteness,” the “astounding” number of road kills in Tasmania, and the perils of riding through the western wilds of Brazil’s Mato Grosso in a VW van.

An Exhilaration of Wings
The Literature of Birdwatching
Edited by Jen Hill

252 pages
22 historical drawings in monochrome

Cloth $25.95
Viking
Publication date: October 1999



Edited by Jen Hill when she was a doctoral candidate in literature at Cornell University,  An Exhilaration of Wings has a dust jacket that beckons with John James Audubon's 1828 painting of a summer tanager (identified as a "tananger"), fancy type, somber colors, and a serious subtitle: "The Literature of Birdwatching."  Yet this book is a featherweight—a nice enough gift for bird enthusiasts at all levels but one that, skimmerlike, only breaks the surface of its subject.

The history of birdwatching in the book's introduction gets off to a good start, with excerpts about birds from Sir Thomas Browne's Notes and Letters on the Natural History of Norfolk (1662) and with discussions of Gilbert White's seminal Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne (1789) and of William Bartram's 1791 catalog of flora and fauna of the American South. But here, Hill skips Mark Catesby, whose Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1731-43) was the first book to show a good number of North American birds (109, to be exact) in detailed color plates. Then Hill hits fast forward, jumping to 1838, when Audubon issued the last of his Birds of America plates. She takes us through the rest of modern birdwatching history in giant leaps, with a glancing reference to Henry D. Thoreau, barely a nod to John Burroughs, who wrote more about birds than just about anyone, a couple of Theodore Roosevelt anecdotes, and no mention of Roger Tory Peterson.

Hill partially redeems her introduction in its closing paragraphs, where she takes an admirable stab at explaining the fascination of birds. "Birdwatching," she says, "is about seeking connection . . . birds offer us an opportunity to be surprised and affirmed, to know that there exist some things that exceed us—free, wheeling spirits that call to us, only to soar beyond our grasp."

In her book's 21 chapters, excerpts from some 75 writers are grouped under such titles as Migration, Nests, Night, Hummingbirds, Raptors, Birdsong, Flight, and Connections. One can forgive Hill for glossing over the bird writings of such heavyweights as Audubon and Thoreau (and even ignoring others, such as Aldo Leopold), in favor of unknown or hard-to-find voices, mainly from the mid-1700s to the early 1900s. However, she should have explained how she found and chose her passages. In the absence of such guidance, An Exhilaration of Wings still is well worth exploring. The following insight, for example, in the chapter titled Bird Physiology, comes from Oliver Goldsmith's Preface and Familiar Introduction to the Study of Natural History (1763):

Of all the birds the ostrich is the greatest, and the American humming-bird the least. In these the gradations of nature are strongly marked, for the ostrich in some respects approaches the nature of that class of animals immediately above him, namely quadrupeds, being covered with hair, and incapable of flying; while the humming-bird, on the other hand, approaches that of insects.

An Exhilaration of Wings has biographies of selected "contributors," where, again, Hill gives Thoreau short shrift and describes Walden as a "political meditation," a label that smacks of graduate-thesis affectation. The index includes birds listed by their common names; there is also a list of sources for the book's 22 historical illustrations. Excerpts from either John Clare's bird list of 1825-26 or Gilbert White's journals appear at the end of certain chapters, presumably to ease the transition to the next. —RW

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