Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Thursday, October 31, 2024

October 21, 2024 Issue

Humans are not the only animals who can talk. Birds do it, too. They are vocal learners just like us. There are scientists who are starting to decode birdsong. I learned this, and other interesting facts about bird vocalization, from Rivka Galchen’s absorbing “Pecking Order,” in this week’s issue. Galchen writes,

A newer generation of scientists has been trying to understand bird vocalizations. The alarm calls of Siberian jays can be said to have been partially translated. One of their screeches indicates a sitting hawk (which prompts other jays to come together in a group), another a flying hawk (jays hide, which makes them difficult to spot), and a third a hawk actively attacking (jays fly to the treetops to search for the attacker, and possibly flee). When cheery birds known as tufted titmice make a piercing sound, other titmice may respond by collectively harrying an invading predator. Some birds even lie. Fork-tailed drongos—common, innocuous-looking little dark birds that live in Africa—sometimes mimic the alarm calls of starlings or meerkats. Duped listeners flee the nonexistent threat, leaving behind a buffet for the drongo.

My favorite part of Galchen’s piece is her description of a recent trip she and her daughter took to Little Stony Point, in the Hudson Valley, to do some bird-watching in the company of two expert birders. Galchen writes,

We heard the “tea kettle tea kettle” call of a Carolina wren; it sounded like a game of marbles to me. We saw a warbling vireo, a Cape May warbler, a blackpoll warbler, and a black-and-white warbler—birds so small that it was difficult to fathom how far some of them had travelled to be there. We heard little chips that sounded like a window being cleaned; a crickety decrescendo that was not made by crickets; a sound like a trill running into a wall; a high-pitched three-fast-one-slow, like a child playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We encountered forty-four species by Yang’s able count, and at the very end we saw a Swainson’s thrush, who apparently wasn’t in the mood to show off. Bird-watching, I thought, is a misleading term. So much of the fleeting, present-tense pleasure of it is bird-listening.

I love that last sentence. Galchen’s "Pecking Order" expanded my appreciation of birdsong. I enjoyed it immensely. 

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