The Wonder of Birds by Jim Robbins

Author:Jim Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The Secret Language of Birds

Birds scream at the top of their lungs in a horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth but sadly we don’t speak bird.

—KURT COBAIN

In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Nightingale,” the shrouded specter of death hovers over the gravely ill emperor of China, poised to take his soul at any moment, when a plucky little nightingale appears on the limb of a tree outside the royal bedroom. “She had heard of the emperor’s illness, and was therefore come to sing to him of hope and trust,” Andersen wrote. “And as she sang, the shadows grew paler and paler; the blood in the emperor’s vein flowed more rapidly, and gave life to his weak limbs; and even Death himself listened and said ‘go on little nightingale, go on.’ ” Moved by the bird’s glorious song, Death takes a holiday and the emperor recovers.

It’s easy to understand why Andersen chose the nightingale. Its song is one of the bird world’s sweetest and most beloved; an older male—and in the bird world, the singers are almost exclusively male—may have more than two hundred fifty variations in his repertoire. And it’s one of the handful of birds that sing at night.

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People have been intrigued and enchanted by the complex sounds that come out of tiny birds since the beginning of human time. And as the tools to study birdsong have vastly improved, the fascination has taken on new dimensions.

Erich Jarvis stands out in the world of birdsong research. An African American from Harlem, he was raised in a gritty neighborhood by a single mother and his grandparents. His father, who was mentally ill and homeless and lived in caves in New York City parks, was murdered in 1989. The crime was never solved. Tall and lithe, Jarvis was on track to become a professional dancer—he studied ballet at Manhattan’s renowned High School for the Performing Arts and was offered a position at the school of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—when science lured him off the stage to a lab where he felt he could still be creative, but have more impact on the world. He is the only birdsong researcher I know who is attempting to transform a bird that cannot sing into one that does.

Jarvis, a former student of Fernando Nottebohm, is an associate professor of neurobiology at Rockefeller University in New York and was the leader of the consortium that renamed the architecture of the bird brain. These days he dances only as a pastime—“mostly salsa,” he says—and instead spends most of his time researching how birds learn to sing, and what that process can tell us about how the human brain learns. He has spent years deconstructing the song circuits of the bird brain to identify the tiniest elements of song at the genetic and cellular levels. By unpacking song learning at these most basic levels, he is casting a great deal of light on understanding the details

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