An SPI Science-based Story for Grades 7-12

In early June a few years back during the height of the singing season I had the great pleasure of joining the renowned ornithologist Don Kroodsma in the field as he recorded bird song. We met in a clearing in the woods of Western Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, headlamps on. The time - to be precise - was 4:22:53 am. 4 hours, 22 minutes, and 53 seconds into a new day and just minutes before the start of the “dawn chorus.” Although unseen, I could hear the musicians gather, shake off sleep, and begin to warm up their instruments. At first slowly and then rising to full just-before-sunrise crescendo, the clearing and surrounding woods filled with song. Don guided me through this - what can only be described as - “performance” of astonishing complexity and beauty. Don’s narrative along with his patient and thoughtful answers to my questions - all with glorious musical accompaniment - is captured in SPI’s recording.

What was, for me, an extraordinarily unique experience was for Don all part of a day’s work, albeit a thrilling part. Don has listened to and recorded birdsong for the past 40+ years on just about every continent on the planet. He is constantly adding to his birdsong library at his home in Massachusetts, where he's professor emeritus of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

His book The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong won the John Burroughs Medal for “outstanding natural history writing” and the American Birding Association’s Robert Ridgeway Award for “excellence in publications in field ornithology.” Other books include Listening to a Continent Sing (2016) and Birdsong for the Curious Naturalist (2020).

Don explores the mysteries of birdsong — how birds learn to sing, why some sing and some don't, and why songs vary from bird to bird and even from place to place. "Birds have song dialects just like we humans have dialects," he says.

On his travels he enjoys listening, knowing that where a bird learned a song is just as important as a bird's genealogy. He noticed in his travels that birds of the same species but in different states sang the same song, but with their own unique "accents."

From his SPI recording:

“The word “songbird,” for an ornithologist is a very special term. It’s not just any bird that makes a sound, but it’s a group of about 4,500 species that have especially complex voice boxes. Two voice boxes, in fact, not just one, which this veery [Don stops and listens] is using as he spirals down at veer-veer-veer. He’s engaging his two voice boxes. Wood thrushes do this in extraordinary fashion. These songbirds, this group of 4,500 species, roughly, have these complex voice boxes and they have special anatomy in the brain that allows them to learn and to imitate songs.
When we record a male singing in May, early in the season, for example—well, take a northern cardinal - they have these beautiful sliding whistles. They start high and drop. You say, that’s a beautiful whistle, but the cardinal would say, oh, that’s a beautiful two whistles, because what I’ve done as a cardinal is what we cardinals do. We start with our right voice box and we produce that high part of the whistle, and, as a mature cardinal singing a perfectly good song, there would be a seamless transition to the left voice box, singing the lower part of that whistle. For a young bird practicing his songs in the spring, that transition is not so seamless. It’s a little abrupt—it’s a little off.

A female finding any kind of imperfection in the song might say, if she were to speak out loud in plain English so that we could understand, “You know, I don’t know for sure if that’s a young bird who is still practicing, or a bird that’s not quite so healthy. Either way, that’s probably not the male I want to father my offspring.”

Don explains that only male birds sing, trying to capture the attention of the elusive female. He characterizes female birds as the “silent composers” of the birdsong symphony as they pick and choose their mates.

Birds are often a child’s first window to the wonders of nature. Shown: artist / writer / naturalist James Prosek as a young boy. James is known internationally for his groundbreaking study of fish. His audio recording is part of the SPI collection.

Birds hear four times better than humans. But what do they hear? Don slows down the recordings in his lab, revealing the many intricate details of birdsong. Listen to Don’s recording of a male cardinal here. Then, listen to the EXACT SAME SONG slowed down here.

Here’s a recording of a wood thrush: For real-time, click here. Slowed down, click here.

"There's this wonderful Zen parable," Don relates. "If you listen to the thrush and hear a thrush, you've not really heard the thrush. But if you listen to a thrush and hear a miracle, then you've heard the thrush."

Don’s recording and related projects and lesson plans can be found at 4-12 Learning Lab / Science/ Earth and Environment.

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The Singing Life of Birds: Understanding The Natural World

An SPI Science-based Story for Grades 7-12