Why Birds Sing: A Kooky Musician Explores The Reasons While Jammin' With Birds

David Rothenberg is an acclaimed musician of the strange variety. Is it normal to visit the National Aviary before the crack of dawn to play the clarinet to the birds, a captive audience? Is it not strange that he travels all the way to Australia to try to play a duet with a show-off Albert lyrebird named George in the woods? And then he creates a CD of his experiments that have additional musicians joining in! His accompanying book, Why Birds Sing, published in the U.S. and the U.K. in 2005, takes us on an intriguing journey into the science, poetry, and indeed, music of birdsong that goes as far back as when Mozart kept a beloved starling that died and inspired him to write the most unusual tune of his life and when Montaigne wrote in 1580 of how birds learn their songs.

You might believe that birds only sing to attract mates and defend their territory, but you would be wrong. Scientists do not want to answer the question of why birds sing because they can’t explain why many birds have very complicated songs of beauty we can even appreciate or why some sing joyfully in groups when they’re not required to help out around the nest. Most will sing whenever they wish and for as long as they wish. It looks very much like they sing because they can and are compelled to.

I learned from Rothenberg that birds have a syrinx instead of our larynx, which is a two-sided windpipe that allows them to sing two songs at a time. He, as a teacher of philosophy, made me wonder just what music is and where it comes from. Do birds really have an innate sense for music just like we do?

Charles Darwin had a hard time explaining some birds. His theory of natural selection explains the singing behavior of most birds, but when it came to a bird like the Australian lyrebird, he was baffled like the rest of us. This bird not only has impressive plumage, but the most excessive, unnecessary courtship ritual of any bird. The book goes into many paragraphs of amusing detail that includes acting like a matador, singing imitations of other birds that took him six years to perfect, then dancing on the swinging vines that are his stage usually without a female in sight or smell. This goes on all day each winter.

Rothenberg won’t take the side of evolution or creation and instead says why not let God exist through evolution for “nature is all the more amazing the more we learn how it works.” Darwin himself believed that females of many species have an innate aesthetic sense that tells them what they like to hear. Why should this sense of beauty have evolved? Darwin and scientists after him have been confused by this question and also why Darwin believed so much in aesthetics.

But Why Birds Sing isn’t only about the history of bird science and philosophy. Rothenberg talks about how birds have involuntarily given up their lives so that laboratory scientists could discover that birds grow new neurons when they learn a new song. This discovery made them realize that the same could be true for humans. The author discusses at length how the scientists don’t want the public to know about it because their research really is important, even if distasteful. I’ll spare you the details. It is morbidly fascinating to read, though.

This insightful, ten-chapter book even has poetry in it that has been written over the years by poets or ornithologists who are trying to capture birdsong. Rothenberg hopes we will get a sense of how intricate their songs are, but thinks that listening to his CD accompanying the book will give us a much better sense. I went to the website whybirdssing.com and also where it’s sold on Amazon and listened to samples of his CD.

Pretty weird stuff. I think I’ll prefer a DVD called Birds, Birds, Birds!, but check out his unique music, please. You might like it more.

Rothenberg is fun to get to know and has written many books already as well as published many CDs. I didn’t feel too overwhelmed by the science mostly, but it may be more appreciated by a bird scientist with as much passion as Rothenberg devotes to it. I was tickled by the eccentricities of some birds that defy explanation, not just the lyrebird, but also the common starling that isn’t just making noise and the mockingbird that isn‘t really mocking. Rothenberg teaches us how to listen more carefully to how they sing and how sonograms help us to see their songs visually.

If you love birds and want to understand them better than you do, you should enjoy Why Birds Sing or the many books he recommends quite a bit. You might even want to become a bird like Rothenberg does. I’m going to end with a passage that really amused me. Hope you like it too!

Why has this bird evolved such an incredible mimetic song, perhaps the most complex in the world? Not for mating purposes. Female marsh warblers choose mates based on the size of the male’s territory, not the quality of his song. The females seem rather uninterested in its awesome complexity. Says LeMaire, “The larger the territory, the more potential nest-sites it contains…Besides, as the song is so complicated and it takes over thirty minutes of continuous singing to get the full repertoire, females would need to sit and listen for ages to evaluate a male’s musical skill. Of course they do no such thing.” As soon as a female appears, the male stops his singing. Concert over… (pp 96)