Birdsong

I sincerely believe that we underestimate the communication capabilities of birds. It is January as I write this and I when was out in the yard this morning my attention was caught and held by a complex and varying birdsong. It took me a moment to locate the singer. I was expecting a larger bird, but this one was small - a sparrow or a finch perhaps.

The song was in bursts and continuously varying. I'm not going to try to describe it, I find descriptions of birdsong hard to reckon - attempts to describe birdsong by even the finest wordsmithing tends to be like trying to embroider silk with an Allen wrench. I will say that the song contained six distinct textures: Warbles, tweets, chirps, whistles, twitters and chatters - seven if you include silences. As I listened through the morning I never identified a repeated phrase. This variety of expression is in itself remarkable, some people can't speak for five minutes without repeating themselves - and mind you, it is not Springtime so I don't believe that the song was directed at snagging a mate; the typical cause for a sterling performance.

This all got me thinking about vocabulary. We humans have a complex symbolic vocabulary and we continue to invent new things to say. We see our communication as complex and evolving because we understand it. The results of our communication are represented in an ever more complex world, both in our understanding of what exists and in the manifestation of our ideas - from music to Mars Landers. But when it is all boiled down we are much in the same place as the songbird; trying to secure food, sex and shelter - keeping ourselves amused in between.

The tools we use to speak in English include five vowels, 21 consonants and silence. I believe that linguists have broken all human speech down to only 200 sound elements. English and Spanish sound the most complex to me because I understand them (somewhat.) Mandarin or Somali sound like simple collections of sounds to me because I don't understand them. When I hear the birdsong with it's six or seven distinct sound elements modulated with a vast array of pitches in a complex matrix of time, am I assuming too much by believing that they are saying more than "feed me, I'm hungry," "I want a mate," or "stay out of my territory..."?