Everybody loves the sound of chirping birds. There's something soothing and peacefull about waking up in the morning to the sound of bird calls. It's as if the birds said to each other, "Let's fill this neighborhood with song so the humans will reflect on how glorious and full of happiness the world is!" At least that's what I used to think.
After seeing a TV documentary on the subject I now know what they're really saying:
"I'm hungry!"
"This is my tree!"
"Where's the women!"
Fascinating!
Maybe this is the universal message that the animal world is trying to communicate to us. I remember that years ago the hippies used to talk about communicating with dolphins. A researcher named Lily wrote a book about his ongoing attempt to teach language to dolphins and his book was on every hippie bookshelf. Lily speculated that when we learn to talk to them dolphins will share with us their rich culture and philosophy along with a history of the oceans going back to the time before man.
Lily died before he could finish his work but others took it up and after years of arduous labor they finally achieved what they were after. A dolphin who learned to manipulate a typewriter with his nose painstakingly typed out a message to his hippie friends who were waiting with abated breath. The message, which was the culmination of tears of work, read:
"I'm hungry!"
"This is my water."
"Where's the women?"
I guess that's the universal message.
HHAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!! :) Very funny Eddie. I know how you like architecture too man, check out my blog here at this site:
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.myspace.com/mbosn
It's got lots of building photos from Zwolle and Amsterdam.
-Sean
There's an excellent book, The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Bird Songs, by Donald Kroodsma (2005). It includes a CD and many "sonograms" of birdsongs, showing that what is meaningful to birds is often tiny differences in the songs that aren't audible to humans, mainly because they go by so incredibly fast. One interesting factoid: like bright plumage, songs (as opposed to call notes) are an almost exclusively male phenomenon, and mainly have to do with things that the males of so many species seem to be hardwired to do: win mates and protect their own. (Unlike you and me, of course!) Another one: because they learn to sing from each other, and at an early age, they tend to have regional accents that indicate where they were hatched! (BTW, this book is beautifully illustrated with pen and ink drawings.)
ReplyDeleteOur Musical Skills teacher told us that during vacation, he would take note of the intervals that birds would be chirping... kind of like a musical message. Like, I would keep hearing a minor sixth from a loon when I'm at the cottage in the summer. It's kind of fun. :)
ReplyDelete"I'm hungry!"
ReplyDelete"This is my water."
"Where's the women?"
Yep, that's pretty much the animal kingdom for you.
In a related story, my sister can do an accurate sounding bird call. One time she used this ability of hers to actually have a conversation with a bird. He (possibly a he) was just sitting in a tree chirping, so she chirped back at him. He moved over to a closer branch to make eye contact with her and chirped some more. So then she chirped some more. Then, for a reason unknown to us, the bird got really mad and flew away in disgust. I don't know what my sister said to him, but I trust she knows not to say it again.
A documentary on Hitchcock's "The Birds" was on tv last night, in a strange coincidence. The birds in that movie were saying:
ReplyDelete"All of you can die now"
Along with the other things.
Too funny Eddie, hippie's HAHAHA .....
ReplyDeleteEveryone in our neighborhood has tons of bird feeders. the birds here are all fat and happy, they squawk and demand more food, when there not screaming at the cats.. not much singing, I think I live in a retirement bird community
I have never understood the fascination with dolphins either. First, dolphins were believed to possess an intelligence comparable to the higher primates. Now people believe dolphins can cure autism.
ReplyDeleteWhy are these animals any more special than other socially-oriented creatures?