I have been listening very intently for the past few days to bird songs. I bought a book about bird songs, which came with an audio CD with almost a hundred samples of bird songs collected from songbirds all over. The book also includes sonograms, audio profiles graphed laterally of the frequencies of some basic bird calls. The whole thing is really fascinating, and I’m beginning to be able to hear and understand these songs in new ways.

I got into the subject partly because I like birds and animals and stuff, but also because I’m in the process of transforming myself into a sort of a songbird, I guess you could say. I figure, if you want to learn about singing, you could obviously listen to other *people* who are singers, and learn a lot. But I’m looking for something more fundamental than that. What is a song? Why even sing them in the first place? How do songs fit into “Nature” itself?

Studying those questions has pulled me into lots of interesting related subject matter. Things like musical language, whistled language, tonal languages, asemic writing, and the mythical language of birds. Certain occultists, apparently, believe that there is a divine or angelic language spoken by birds, sort of a proto-language composed of frequencies out of which all other languages ultimately spring.

The concept is a compelling one, especially as you begin to really listen closely to bird songs and other beautiful noises which spring spontaneously out of nature. Listening to these bird songs, sometime I find certain songs funny. I don’t know what makes them that way, but some of them make me laugh. They make me imagine the bird who sang them must have had a good sense of humor or an interesting personality. I guess I have been hanging out with dogs too much, some people might say. But dogs to me have become people. Birds are on their way. I’ve been finding myself petting plants gingerly with my hand lately as well. I feel like they understand and appreciate the contact.

Some birds, it turns out, are born with their songs. Somehow the tones and intervals are embedded into the story-codes of their genes. Other birds learn their songs from their parents. Still others learn them from neighboring birds, and birds they run into on their travels and migrations. I’ve read about a wren, called the Bewick’s wren, which as a juvenile spends its time imitating (poorly) the songs of its male neighbors. It will practice in seclusion over and over, until it gets the songs right and gains the confidence to go out in public and sing them.

I guess that’s where I’m at right now.

I’m also reading a book about evolutionary biology, essentially on the topic of “why does sex exist”? The assumption they seem to be operating under is that sexual reproduction must confer some kind of evolutionary benefit in order for it to exist at all, since there are a number of other bio-genetic solutions to reproduction. Bird songs, on a related note, are closely linked with reproduction. Birds with the most beautiful songs and plumage, and who have mastered the mating dances and courtship rituals of their species are the birds who attract the most and best mates and whose genes survive and thrive over time.

Evolution, I’m beginning to think, is not at all about progress. It’s simply about creativity. The reason sex exists and the reason birds and other animals sing is simply because they are alive, and to live life to its fullest is to celebrate and to create. Birds learning each other’s songs is the same as human singers learning to do covers of other people’s music. A cover of a song from a generation previous to ours isn’t necessarily better or worse. It’s not evolution for somebody to interpret the same piece of music in two different ways. It’s not adaptation for some evolutionary advantage, so much as it is simply the joy of discovery, of creation and of sharing beauty.

That, I think, is why birds sing. Because it’s beautiful. They’re celebrating being alive and having lungs with which to sing. It doesn’t really need to be more than that. Also been reading the Tao Te Ching again, and wanted to end on one “song” contained within it, number 29:

Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.

The Master sees things as they are,
without trying to control them.
She lets them go their own way,
and resides at the center of the circle.