Category Archives: birds in key

More begging baby birds

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Zebra Finch Fledglings

I happened upon a tape with a lot of “fledgling feed-me’s” on it. This must have been years ago when my indoor population explosion was just getting underway. I had zebra finches and budgies reproducing. The zebra finches tended to build nests anywhere and I caught them double-clutching a couple times early on before I figured out how to discourage such behavior, so that might explain why the zebra finch children are so loud, there must have been a lot of them. They are at what you might call full-fledged volume (sorry), the decibels having increased with age. When they start out as hatchlings, they sound like someone is quietly shaking a box of pins.

Zebra Finch Hen on Nest

The budgie begging is somehow not quite as raucous, it’s rather pleasant. It’s hard to tell what effect my tortured reading through Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier had on the birds’ future vocalizations.

Recording of Zebra Finch and Budgie Fledglings Begging in Key

On the recording, the zebra finch fledglings have just started in after I finished practicing the C# major fugue (they came in earlier but I decided to spare you), right before the C# minor prelude. Then shortly after they subside you can hear a little trilling chorus of budgie babes.

A clutch of budgie nestlings

Baby birds beg in key with music

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Little's parents allopreening, or maybe how it all started...

Recording of “Little” begging in key with Mozart

Before hatchlings, nestlings and fledglings start talking (calling) or singing (generally, if they’re males), their only vocalization is to beg for food. This starts immediately upon hatching as a faint whimper, but builds to crescendos as the bird grows.

Attached is a brief recording of the only Spice Finch child produced in my house, begging for food. I named her “Little,” not knowing whether she would turn out to be a boy or a girl. Those strong little musical “peeps” you hear belonged to Little. As for the Mozart, I was trying to learn the Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, the one with the Elvira Madigan theme for the adagio, after hearing Stephen Hough play it so wonderfully with the Chicago Symphony. I didn’t have an orchestra to play with, unfortunately, only a recording of a nameless orchestra that was at its own tempo and, because I could not hear the canned orchestra over the piano unless I drowned out the birds, I gave up eventually. If I ever attempt this again, I will have to write my own cadenzas because the ones that come with the sheet music are dreadful, sounding more like Schumann than Mozart.

Long before she fledged, Little fell out of the nest onto the floor. I picked her up and put her back, urging her parents to feed her. At that time she was no more than pencil eraser. I don’t know what made her parents listen to me but they continued to feed her and she fledged, however awkwardly.

Parent with Little

Although I decided somewhere along the line that she was female, she didn’t live long enough for me to really find out. It wasn’t until she stopped begging and started getting around on her own that I realized she was physically impaired. She was missing her right foot, so whenever she landed it was difficult for her to sit without leaning over. It occurred to me this might have been why her parents kicked her out of the nest. They begrudgingly took over parenting of Little and she lived longer, perhaps, than she should have. But I think what did her in was her inability to fit in with all the adults. If she’d had siblings she might have had a better life, at least for a while, but I think she died of a broken heart. Once her parents stopped feeding her, they ignored her totally.

Little, first fledged

5-Part Fugue with Crow

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Recording of Elvis and Bach 5-part Fugue in C# Minor

Attached is a recording of my old buddy Elvis cawing along to Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, the C# minor fugue. He sang along with the prelude very nicely too but here he came in quite strong, and then managed to carry on somewhere where there was an echo, creating his own “reverb.” How ingenious of him. In any event, I was pleased to discover this recording because he has a lovely voice, unlike any other crow I have heard since, and I suspect if I was really paying attention all along I might be able to discern certain crows by their voices.

In the park I had a crow friend I called Sam–should he turn out to be Samantha–who is probably by now paired up with someone else of his own species, but we became good friends soon after he had fledged. I remember his first spring after leaving the nest, he was hanging out with other crows when a young Cooper’s Hawk decided to threaten him. When he just barely evaded attack, the Cooper’s must have made an impression on him because he memorized the Cooper’s Hawk’s call perfectly, and for quite a while afterward almost every time he saw me, Sam would imitate the Cooper’s Hawk. It soon became a little joke we shared with each other. In fact I had become so used to Sam imitating the Cooper’s Hawk that a year or so later I did not pay attention in the company of crows when I heard a Cooper’s Hawk, only to look above my head and suddenly realize it was an actual Cooper’s Hawk and not Sam imitating one!

The park crows do have a special call when they see me, it’s usually CAW-caw-caw, which I like to imagine is “Lisa’s here.” But they also do one that is more “CAW caw, CAW caw” which could be “hot dogs, hot dogs.” I hope as the crow numbers increase I will be able to hear and distinguish more vocalizations.

Anyway, my apologies to Bach for this somewhat feeble early rendition of his fugue.

What’s up with the “in-keyness”?

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I already thought it was interesting the birds were listening to me play and participating, but when I realized they were in key with the music it made me stop and think. Birds seemed to be pretty autonomous, so why were they choosing to sing in key with the music I was playing? Or were they somehow compelled to be in key with it, not by choice? I tried to find out if anyone had noticed this or written about it somewhere but came up empty. There were studies proving that birds had absolute pitch. Oh good, I had been feeling as if the avians and I had something in common besides our love of music. But no studies of birds singing in key with music. I started thinking maybe this was pretty obvious, like your face has a nose in the middle, to a native musician close to nature, but wondered if anyone in the so-called civilized world had ever considered it a phenomenon. So I started writing scientists about it. I got some courteous responses but nobody really wanted to believe that I could tell them the birds were in key with the music. After all, I have no credentials but my ears. I’m not an ornithologist or a musicologist. I’m just an annoyingly curious woman with a discerning ear.

So I decided to lay low and just keep taping the birds as I practiced, soon becoming more interested in their responses than the pitches, taking for granted that they were always in key. What came to pass over time was that listening to the birds was making me more aware of everything I heard. I caught myself listening to the music in my head again, I had a soundtrack, usually going over whatever it was I was learning at the time. But sometimes the music in my head was not in the key it was written. I had transposed it, and it did not feel natural to “play” it in the right key. What was going on here? Why did I feel as if I had to transpose?

Or I’d wake up in the morning with music in my head and become aware of the robin singing outside my window who was in the same key as the music in my head. Were we telecommunicating or were we both getting our sense of pitch from somewhere else?

Then I’d be having a conversation with someone, maybe a complete stranger, just exchanging a few words, and realizing after we spoke that we were in the key of the music in my head. This was getting to be weird!

I paid attention for a while to the music in my head, whatever it was, right before I got off the train, because I knew there were always three crows by the station in the late afternoon on my way home. Wouldn’t you know they were cawing in the key of the music in my head?

Searching for more practical applications of this experiment, I became aware of the music in the locker room at the gym and, listening to the conversations of women around me, realized they were speaking in the key of the background music. Then somewhere along the line I decided to pay attention to the underlying tone of the conversations as people left Orchestra Hall after a Chicago Symphony concert. Sure enough, everyone was speaking in the key of the last chord the orchestra played.

Going back to the birds, I knew they weren’t always singing. They had songs, but they also had calls, albeit their conversations sound more musical to our ears than our own do to ours. But the birds were reacting to music the same way we do. We have to. What is music but a series of vibrations? Our in-keyness and the birds’ as well is a visceral, physical response that we cannot control.

So maybe I have an explanation for the determination of the mourning dove who sat and listened carefully to the aria of the Goldberg, just waiting for his chance to sing along. He knew somewhere in there, the vibrations were coming up and they would be right in his key, give or take a half step in either direction; he was capable of transposing too. I named him Primo Columbo. He had a hen named Prima, and they produced a son, Secondo, who eventually came to sing with his father. Oh but I forgot, mourning doves don’t learn their songs, science tells us they are born with their song ingrained within them. Well, when I find that tape of Primo and Secondo singing together, I’ll put it up here. Even if Secondo already knew the tune, it sure sounded like he was getting a few tips from his dad.