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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