Birds Gotta Sing

...Like the white-crested laughing thrush, he seems to respond to the human musicians...

...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...

...Why not...

...Opposite page one, and labeled "The Laughing Thrush," this illustration actually depicts a Eurasian jay...

...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...

...George does not disappoint...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Bird song challenges science and art alike to extend their reach," he says...

...Armed with only their instruments and a tape recorder, they park themselves in the territory of a wild Albert's lyrebird known as George...

...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...

...My skepticism grew when I took a careful look at the full-page illustration of the bird purported to inspire Why Birds Sing...

...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...

...Or does it all really come down to science, to that deadly serious business of outcompeting rivals and securing mates...

...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...

...Now that the amateurs have proven to be correct, such books are due for a significant revision...

...Darwin's successors have offered explanations of their own—Amotz Zahavi's handicap principle, for example...

...I'm reminded of what Ben Hecht wrote toward the end of his autobiography: "To think like a dog, or even a goose, would be a decided advantage to any writer...

...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 Kroods-mas of the world into perfect harmony over the question of why birds sing...

...If they are the result of years of selection, there must be something other than mere efficiency at work in nature...

...Perhaps it's time to change that...

...As in the hottest jam session, it doesn't matter who's from where . . . it's the sound that counts...

...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...

...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 Bird-song: A Natural History by Don Stap...

...Unsure whether he was in a duet or a musical battle, Rothenberg was nonetheless enthralled...

...On the other hand, Rothenberg isn't convinced that poets have gotten any closer to the truth...

...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...

...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...

...They jam with birds because, as Rothenberg later explains, "One animal's song reaches out to another...

...Although the aesthete in me wants to 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...

...Rothenberg's book is more readable than Hartshorne's...

...Paradoxically, many readers who start Bi-rds 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...

...He decided to write this book after a thrush native to Southeast Asia made him suspect there was more to the story...

...Males of this species dance around and display a large and colorful lyre-shaped tail when they sing, and, like the mockingbird, they mimic the songs of other birds...

...Rothenberg distrusts the handicap principle and any other scientific hypothesis that makes beautiful songs seem almost incidental to the lives of birds...

...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...

...These are not obviously useful adaptations," observes Rothenberg...

...He reproduces the sonogram that graphs the tape recording of his clarinet and George's voice, triumphantly labeling it "Interspecies Music at Last...

...Because by "handicapping" himself in this way, he exhibits the qualities that female mockingbirds prefer...

...A robin-size bird seemed particularly interested in the sounds coming from Rothenberg's clarinet...

...Until this year, scientific consensus said that the ivory-billed woodpecker was extinct...

...when Rothenberg and an artist friend, a flutist, entered the Rainforest Room and began to play along with the songs of awakening birds...

...So what if science hasn't caught up with what some people know to be true intuitively...

...His musical variety and his stamina send a signal that helps him find a mate...

...When music starts to happen be^tween humans and birds, you don't have to peel apart the categories of manmade and natural...

...Was this strange bird—a white-crested laughing thrush, according to the aviary's cleaning lady— sending him a message...

...Rothenberg's philosophical credentials tempered my doubts somewhat...

...The confusion lingers, but maybe this "gift of the song" is enough—"one simple offering from human to animal and back...

...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...

...Rothenberg starts to wonder whether birds sing not only because they can, but also because they enjoy it...

...He would be observing life without human confusion, and bound to find some wonderful news...

...He never finds it...

...Are they making music...

...This is not to say that Rothenberg is an amateur when it comes to the science of bird song...

...The last scientifically credible sighting had been in 1944...

...This happened early one morning at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, Robert Winkler is the author of Going Wild: Adventures with Birds in the Suburban Wilderness...

...The bird cocked his head, hopped around as if dancing, and produced rhythmic calls and short melodies that counterpointed Rothenberg's riffs...

...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...