photo of a Mynah bird with mouth wide open
Photo of a Mynah bird . Image by PublicDomainPictures

In This Article:

  • How birds communicate and how humans can engage with them
  • The musicality of birds and its influence on human creativity
  • Stories of cross-species interactions and their deeper meanings
  • Philosophical reflections on the uni-verse and sound

You Too Can Talk with Birds

by Alan W Powers.

All living beings communicate with their own species and react to other species, often with fear—as in the common gargle-rattles birds make when detecting a threat. Reversing this species-centric tendency, I speak with other species and fear my own. Communing cross-species, I reach out to what Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century Italian Dominican friar and philosopher, called in Latin the ­uni­versus, the “turned into one.”

My book BirdTalk gained worldwide fans, among them Hollis Taylor, an Australian violinist, composer, and zoo­musicologist in 2003. I am not alone in my fascination with birdsong and my efforts to imitate and notate their music. Taylor has composed music based on Pied Butcherbird intervals. Both A. J. Mithra, from Chennai, India, another zoomusicologist, and I have written tunes based on the Carolina Wren.

Bird-Talk and Tune-Talk

My musical instruction from birds and my musical development have yielded fruitful effects on myself, including health of spirit. A mind at peace with itself protects the body’s health, according to Thai healer Tulku Thundup (1998). For a mind at war with itself, as my critical mind can be, tune-talk restores peace.

Humans consider bird speech as music because our own speech lacks song, except from great poets. When birds speak their worries—about weather, about location, about food— they contort their vocalization. Still, even their anguish and anxiety sound like music to us.


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We may respond and engage, though it takes practice; for instance, talking to small English Robins. To prepare before crossing the Atlantic, I whistle as high as I can, for a month. One of my proudest conversations took place in Kensington Garden, London. A sustained, high conversation with one English Robin, ten feet away. They’re small, but feisty.

Crows, like all Blackbirds (Starlings, Ravens), boast complex communications. English Blackbirds talk lower; they slur in whistling range, in diatonic (piano) intervals. Visiting Weymouth, Dorset, I held a five-minute conversation with such a Blackbird on a nearby stone house roof. I even notated seventy measures, some repeated, on musical staffs.

Morris Swadesh considers the origins and diversification of languages, including Maine dialect “baan” for barn (2006). My having admired the irony of Maine talkers like my grandfather, I say my failure to roll the Italian r is actually a Maine accent in Italian. Meanings diverge geographically with human and bird talk.

Birdtalk in Songs

Birds arise in love songs throughout the world, as in the Neapolitan song “‘Nu passierello sperzo,” the sparrow chased away by the birth of a child or by lovers in the woods (Paliotti 1992).

J. Mithra and I both wrote tunes based on the Carolina Wren, often a triplet talker. Of tripleness, Leonard Bernstein says, “It’s true that much music is triple. The three-concept is almost as fundamental as the two-concept. But three is not grounded in our biological nature. It is not physical in function. The heart just doesn’t beat in 3/4 time, Viennese propaganda to the contrary” (1966). Adding a triplet to a duplet, we have a five-note series: maybe not human, but birds with two wings, two feet, and a tail? Maybe triplets are physical with birds. And quintuplets.

The most beautiful birdtalk, the pentatonic song of the Wood Thrush’s, like the five black keys on a piano, often ends in a rasp. I say, all birds want to be drummers, like insects or octopuses. Many like to imitate other sounds, garbage cans or children playing. One Macaw imitated my laugh, exactly. Pied Butcherbirds sound like Aaron Copland with tritones and octave-plus intervals. When a Blue Jay imitates a Red-tailed Hawk, he terrifies his victims into flying where he can see them.

Sound and Meaning

Of course, the cosmos fills with sounds, as does the universe, planets and beyond the heliopause, as in Voyager 1 plasma waves. I don’t plan to communicate beyond our humble planet, though I listen to the wind on Mars from rover Perseverance. In college I wrote fifty pages on sound and meaning: reading Renaissance poets Wyatt, Spenser, Donne, and Milton.

For each poet, sound entwined in a similar way in their best and worst passages: for example, Milton’s tendency to move from rising iambs to falling, didactic trochees or even dactyls: “and with the setting sun / Dropt from the Zenith like a falling star.” Commands and moral demands employ a falling rhythm, “LOCK him UP” or trochees, even, MAKE SURE YOU. Historically, the nineteenth century often used falling meters, dactyls like “This is the forest primeval,” and that century preferred didactic verse, issued from above, the rulers or higher.

Does this work in birdtalk, where falling vocables like the Titmouse’s early glissando, or the Cardinal’s, or the Red-tailed Hawk often imitated by Blue Jays?

Time and the uni-verse will tell...

Copyright ©20023, 2023. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission.

Article Source: 

BOOK: Conversations with Birds

Conversations with Birds:The Metaphysics of Bird and Human Communication
by Alan Powers.

For decades Alan Powers has studied bird vocalizations, developing the remarkable ability to imitate birds’ songs and get them to respond and even change tunes. Through his years of study, he has discovered that birds can teach us important lessons about the world and about ourselves. As Powers explains, by communing cross-species we reach out to the timeless interconnected web of all life past and present--what Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno called in Latin the Uni-versus, the “Whole turned into One.

”Sharing his journey to learn birdtalk and his profound observations about the poetic, spiritual, and healing influences of birdsong, Powers explores the ancient language of birds and the depth of meaning birds convey.

Click here for more info and/or to order this paperback book. Also available as a Kindle edition.

About the Author

The only thing Alan W Powers shares with Dr. Seuss is their place of birth, Springfield MA. Alan Powers has worked as a harmless drudge, a college teacher of composition and Shakespeare, in Minnesota and Massachusetts. He has written a guest Safire "Head over Googles," and appeared in two poetry films, Keats and his Nightingale and A Loaded Gun. He has been interviewed on Italian TV and radio, and American radio.

As a jazz trombonist on the bench, he wrote jazz tunes based on British and American birdsong, the subject of his first popular book. With the ears of a spy, he has written verse monologs based on scandalous overheard conversations. Despite several articles on Shakespeare (and law), his lifework turns out to be translations and a biography of Giordano Bruno, who was sent to the Inquisition by one bad student evaluation. A sceptic on education reform, he says, "Good teachers get fired; great teachers, killed--Socrates, Christ, Giordano Bruno."

Article Recap:

Birds communicate in complex ways, often inspiring human creativity through their songs and behaviors. This article explores the art of engaging with birds, from imitating their melodies to understanding their emotional expressions. Stories of cross-species communication reveal the beauty of connection beyond language. The philosophical reflections on bird talk remind us of the deeper harmony that exists in nature and encourage us to listen to the uni-verse around us.

#BirdTalk #CrossSpeciesCommunication #NatureInspired #BirdSongs #UniVerseConnection #TalkingToBirds