From “The Year of the Oriole”

Take your palm and tap four beats steadily on something in front of you—a table, a book, a PalmPilot. This morning, early, I heard a call note in that rhythm, three notes and a half-beat delay on the fourth, a descending minor third. Deep, deep, deepuh dee. (The uh is a musical rest, silent.) I don’t know which bird it is, and I’m in bed at 5 a.m., unwilling to find out. Though I learn some dozen new songs a year—all for the same bird—there are thousands of songs I don’t yet know. These occur in my own region, to say nothing about a province away. Like all language learning, I immerse myself in the unfamiliar until over the months and years it becomes familiar.

I have declared this the year of the Oriole. (Sounds like the desperate optimism of a baseball fan, but no.) Orioles make a plaintive call note, a falling half-tone glissando. I believe they also make it on the wing, like Robins’ staccato patter taking off. A few years back I pulled a St. Francis and tried to teach the birds. Recall that St. Francis of Assisi’s peculiar gift was not listening to birds but “preaching”—the word used in the early accounts—to them. Professionals easily credit this story. Anyone who preaches or even teaches can believe that the birds make as attentive listeners as most parishioners or college sophomores.

This Oriole year I gave up trying to teach them a famous symphonic riff. (Stay tuned.) I just listen, and if they are far enough away, I echo them. You must be careful if they’re close. An echo at close distance chases them off. Probably half of all birdtalk, like people on cell phones, is locative. “I’m here. Where are you?” Some birdcalls function as simple greetings, others as choral matins, telephones, road signs and roadways, flight paths, roadside route numbers, vegetable-stand signs. At the same time they can be stylish vehicles—elegant dress or ceremonial robes—performed to impress. Season dictates much. Spring call notes roughly translate, “Get out of my tree!” They just say it with much more style. “Yo! Flee the tree, see?” But on a cool fall morning, the Cardinal’s quick-rising, whip-like call note finds a distant answer. Is it his broodmate? His colleague? His son? Will one of them migrate, or did they both inherit nonmigrating genes?

Back to the summer Oriole, who hits a plaintive call note. He follows it with a cheery song, the rhythm of “Gaudeamus igitur” (the college Latin drinking song). The melody is a major triad starting on the second note. Inexplicably, the great nineteenth-century American “birdear”—pun intended—Simeon Cheney, in his enthusiasm, demurs about his song, calling the Oriole “hardly a songster.”

He is the most beautiful of our spring visitors, has a rich and powerful voice, the rarest skill in nest-building, and is among the happiest, most jubilant birds. Hardly a songster, the oriole is rather a tuneful caller, a musical shouter. (Cheney 1892, 72)

Cheney does not appear to have read Thoreau’s journal encounter with the “ones that Midas touched,” nor to have heard the Warbler-like chatter I describe a page farther on.

Symphonic Bird

I don’t know how he did it, Giovanni di Bernadone (St. Francis, to you). He seems to have engaged them somehow, spoken to them. I tried this once—with Orioles, too. I noticed one who made three short notes and then two glisses a minor third lower. To hint at what I tried to teach him, the first three notes sounded like the first notes of Beethoven’s most famous theme, starting his Fifth Symphony. The only hitch was the fourth note glissandoed down a half step. And the Oriole’s fifth note repeated that gliss exactly. I figured I could use the bird’s tonal flexibility and whistle the fifth note a half step plus a quarter tone higher. Bigawd, the bird did it! I had “preached”—what, music practicum, I suppose—to a bird. His four notes sounded almost exactly like the first four of Beethoven, except his glissando on the fourth, down from the minor third to the major. And, truth to tell, the fifth note was a quarter tone lower than Beethoven, but “close enough for union work,” as musicians say. I repeated my “prompt,” and he repeated his sluicy Beethoven. About three times. But having succeeded with the one note, of course I advanced to the descending fifth with which Ludwig concludes his phrase. And I heard . . . I heard . . . nothing. I tried it again. Nothing again. That last blew his mind, or it blew my cover as an ersatz Oriole. At any rate, the Oriole could not conceive or perform such a note in such a sequence. It was uncanonical, outré, a gaffe, a breach, a solecism if not a faux pas. I may have sounded to him like an overbearing megalomaniac crazy to close the conversation, for after all, who was he talking to? Beethoven, not me. That eclipse of a composer.

I should add that the Oriole’s instinct was very like the German composer’s. That descending fifth interval comes much later in the symphony. Beethoven, like the Oriole, makes a long series of dih-dih-dih dahs in different keys before he gets to the descending fifth.

Perhaps less than one-fifth of all birdsong is imitable by humans. Although I write about that one-fifth, I do not forget the vast ranges of inimitable birdsong: almost all songs by Blackbirds, Warblers, Finches, scavenging shorebirds, Hawks and Kestrels, even Wrens. And hundreds of varieties besides. Even among the imitable birds, there are often inaccessible languages. Partly this is a matter of higher frequency than most humans— at least, than I—can whistle. For instance, Orioles have a whole other language they shift into after they have given their “dial tones,” or series of them. Their second language sounds high pitched, like a Warbler or Swallow or Red-winged Blackbird, though it lacks the overtones of the latter. This second, Oriole-to-Oriole “specielect” must be what Thoreau witnesses in his Journals, where he calls these birds “Golden Robins” (or because of their nests, “Hangbirds”). Thoreau records, “May 8, 1852 Two golden robins; they chatter like blackbirds; the fire bursts forth on their backs when they lift their wings” (Allen 1993, 287).

It’s difficult to know what birds are saying, though something can be gleaned by context. Admittedly, an observer’s preoccupation colors interpretation. My friend, a father of nine, thought that the summer birds near my house were asking me to feed them; I agreed that they were discussing food indirectly, by staking their territorial claims. Emily Dickinson in one poem goes so far as to “hear” moral values from a Robin. The Mourning Dove gets its name from the mournful affect of its song for us humans, whereas it may be singing of pure joy, “like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth,” as Shakespeare says in his Sonnet 38.

The first time I really held an extended back-and-forth bird conversation—echoic, granted—was with a very aggressive Titmouse. Probably because of the demands of specialized feeding and population density, Titmice are among the most aggressive local birds, so you can appear to “call” them simply by reiterating their call note. It’s a descending minor third, repeated usually three times. Return this call insistently and a Titmouse is sure to appear on the tree above you. When he does, you will know that what you said—essentially, “Get out of my tree”—is exactly what he was saying.

Birdtalk tells us much about our own human speech. Our greetings, for instance, share something of birds’ call notes. Think of a host’s greeting at a toney party, say, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels of the roaring twenties. “How d’yi do?” is a greeting, yes, a welcome. But it’s also a territorial warning. Whose turf are you on? The host’s. What is the “territory” of a human call note? It’s a vast social network. Where are you in this network? If one considers the implications, an introduction, in that old, static society, was a crisis. Best get out one’s clearest whistle and pipe a repeated minor third, like the Titmouse.