In his old age John Ruskin lamented, ‘I have made a great mistake. I have wasted my life with mineralogy, which has led to nothing. Had I devoted myself to birds, their life and plumage, I might have produced something worth doing.’
Here are two bird books which have been eminently worth doing. Both are by North Americans but their sweep is global. David Rothenberg is a musician, composer, author and professor; the Canadian, Graeme Gibson, is a renown- ed novelist and chairman of the Pelee Island Bird Observatory. Gibson only succumbed to the charm of birds at 37, which is why he begins his book with the Ruskin quotation.
Rothenberg’s interest in birds has also intensified with age — it is only since 2000 that he has taken to playing music live with them. This forms part of the quest of Why Birds Sing, a book which harmoniously combines music, poetry and science, stories and data. At times a song is reproduced as a sonogram or snatch of musical annotation. A person who can read music will accordingly benefit even more than one who cannot, but the quest is the point.
Why do birds sing? The scientific explanation is to attract a mate (a powerful human motive too, of course) or defend a territory, but even Darwin wrote that birds ‘have strong affections, acute perception and a taste for the beautiful’. Rothenberg agrees. The more he grapples with birdsong, biology and ethology, ‘the more it seems closer to artistic elegance than objective certainty’. He concludes that birds sing for the same reason we do — because they must. And they were singing long before us, and may well sing long after we are history.
He gives ample proof of the intelligence of birds and the complexity of their songs, and cites all manner of powerful supportive witnesses: scientific, philosophic, poetic and musical. There is also his own understanding of birdsong, derived from their response to his improvised accompaniments on clarinet, saxophone and other instruments.
Many musicians and composers have found birdsong inspiring. Mozart bought a starling in a pet shop and was startled when it whistled a fragment of his latest piano concerto, in G major, K453 — not only that, it had modified the melody, changing G natural to G sharp, thus creating ‘a sound centuries ahead of its time’. When the bird died, Mozart and his friends gave it a full-dress funeral, the composer delivering a poetic eulogy at the grave. Some thought this immature behaviour, as Mozart’s father had died the same week. A few days later, Mozart wrote the notably atypical K522, titled A Musical Joke, in imitation of the starling’s apparently disjointed mimicry.
Most major composers of the Romantic era wrote pieces derived from birdsong, but it was not until Olivier Messiaen that a classical composer took it seriously. His most famous composition, Quartet for the End of Time, was inspired by the Dawn Chorus while he did sentry duty at Verdun in 1940, and was given its first performance when he was a prisoner in Stalag 8A. He wrote, ‘The birds are the opposite of time. They represent a longing for light, for stars, for rainbows and for jubilant song.’
Messiaen recognised music in the rhythms and structures as much as the tunes of birdsong. At 88 he travelled to the depths of an Australian rainforest to transcribe the song of the greatest of all the world’s songsters: the rare and secretive Albert’s lyrebird, which takes five years to learn its extraordinary repertoire. Rothenberg’s book comes to a crescendo with his own recent duet in the wild with George, the same uniquely friendly and now venerable bird that had performed for Messiaen. The bird’s guardian stood at Rothenberg’s shoulder: ‘I do believe you’re getting to him,’ he mused.
Gibson’s abundantly illustrated miscellany complements Rothenberg’s book by delving deep into myth and folklore, as well as poetry and description. His nine subject sections are pleasingly idiosyncratic and prettily designed, with an abundance of illustration by Audubon and others. Oddities abound. For example, Isaiah Berlin’s report to Stephen Spender from Germany in 1936 of a man jailed for throwing a stone at a bird, the Third Reich being ‘opposed to cruelty in any shape or form’.
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