by Nina Burton
The idea that animals should drive the plot came from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, where a boy learns the languages and morals of creatures. Kipling’s alpha wolf Akela is paralleled in Lagerlöf’s head goose Akka, and Kipling’s tiger Shere Khan was kin to her Smirre Fox. Since the flora and fauna of the jungle are unlike Sweden’s, the landscape was reflected in moose, mallards, swans and eagles. They acted more or less as they do in nature, and although they were allowed to speak they were not humanised as in the old fables or in the Disney worlds that would come later. They merely demonstrated that humans were not the be all and end all of life on Earth.
It was unrealistic for Smirre Fox to chase a flock of geese all across Sweden, of course, but he became the common thread that gave purpose and excitement to the wild geese’s fairly rambling journey. Lagerlöf was not unfamiliar with the natural sciences. She knew from her childhood home, for example, that a domesticated goose could run off with wild geese and return with its own young, and she did consult an expert in migratory birds on the behaviour of the wild geese. At the same time, it was through language that she brought nature to life, and author Michel Tournier would later place The Wonderful Adventures of Nils among classics like the fables of Fontaine and Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.
For me, Nils Holgersson’s winged friends outshone the most unlikely of inventions in the story. Birds were like a fairy tale in real life as well. Light as letters, and thanks to their incredible senses, they could make their way across stormy seas and vast continents to the exact spot they wanted to reach.
I once had the desire to observe their flight at close range, so one warm September evening I caught the last bus near Vemmenhög, where Nils Holgersson had begun his journey. I had brought along a small tent and a constellation umbrella so I could orienteer like the birds. My destination was the Falsterbo coast, where they would pass over. It was already dark when I arrived at the final stop, but guided by the lighthouse beacon I found a place where the grass was short and the horizon near. Once I was settled, I heard a gentle murmur above the tent. I’d seen pictures of how millions of migrating birds can cover the entire coastline on a radar screen, until it appeared to bloom and slip out into the sea. Now that flying coastline was above me.
I lay under that murmur, nestled in the down of my sleeping bag like the wing of a wild goose. I imagined lakes, rivers and mountains flowing into the flying birds’ memories faster than into any schoolchild’s mind. After all, birds must be able to match latitude to longitude no matter where they are. Their senses were with them, and their view was broad, thanks to the placement of their eyes on either side of their heads. Across the sea, too, came infrasound from the movement of the waves, but the most important part was their sense of the Earth. Deep inside our planet are rivers of glowing iron that create magnetic fields to which the birds orient themselves like iron filings. These gave their flight a clear direction, disturbed only by electromagnetism from the electrical apparatus of cities. They were living in much more intense contact with the Earth and the sun than we do.
When I peered out of the tent at dawn, I was still in the borderland between the escape of dreams and the facts of reality. A fairy tale egg gleamed in the grass. Upon closer inspection, this discovery only highlighted the extent to which the birds’ ability to understand their surroundings exceeded my own, for the egg was a ball and my nocturnal territory a golf course. But once I packed up my tent, I took with me the thought that even an egg contains everything that might develop into a journey that spans the world.
An egg is the bird’s world of origin, so if you want to make a connection with the tiny life contained within the shell, you must start there. Konrad Lorenz did just that with the greylag geese he studied. He had been fascinated with them since childhood, when he heard a flock of wild geese passing by the River Danube. Without knowing where they were going, he, in a burst of youthful longing, wanted to join them. He later tried to express his feelings in images, and they all depicted geese.
As a zoologist he would come to follow their lives in a different way. His house was already full of aquarium fish, dogs, primates, rodents, parrots and jackdaws, but he came to have a special relationship with the greylag geese he raised. To see how they emerged from their eggs, he let a domesticated goose brood a few of them until they were about to hatch. Then he moved one to an egg-hatching apparatus so he could attend the birth. When he put his ear to the egg, he heard cheeping, knocking and rustling inside. Then a hole appeared in the shell and a beak stuck out, and after a while an eye met his own. Then came the greylag gosling’s contact call, a tiny whisper, and he imitated it in response. With this little greeting ceremony he had become a greylag parent, for now the chick had imprinted on him.
This wasn’t something he meant to do, but forever after it became impossible for him to leave the chick for even a moment. Each time he tried to do so it let out a heartrending peep, so he had to carry it around in a basket during the day and bring it into his bed at night. At regular intervals came the contact call, an inquiring little vivivivi? In The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlöf interpreted this call to mean, ‘Here I am, where are you?’ and Lorenz felt this was accurate. He must continuously keep up the conversation throughout the chick’s upbringing, since helpless baby birds need constant contact. When the gosling and her siblings grew up, he would take them on walks to meadows where they could eat fresh leaves, or to lakes where they could swim together, and when the birds flew he ran beneath them with his arms spread wide. To get them to land, all he had to do was fall into a crouch.
But geese must also communicate with one another, not least on long flights. They keep tabs on each other by way of a noisy conversation even as they stick close together like cyclists in a race. Like cranes, they fly in a V-formation so each bird’s wing creates a spiral of air that helps lift the birds behind them.
Other birds form different sorts of groups when they fly. Further south I had seen tens of thousands of starlings moving in shapes that flowed into and out of each other like clouds, or like abstract figures in an ever-changing web. As though made of breath they would rise and sink from the horizon, the cloud contracting and expanding. One moment they seemed to be a fingerprint in the air; the next, a floating gas. These flocks are called murmurations. I liked that word. It’s related to words like murmur, hum and buzz – when individual voices blend into a greater whole.
But how did such flocks form? People were beginning to understand how each individual in them keeps track of every other, at least. Since birds have a wider field of vision and faster reaction times than humans, each bird can keep an eye on seven others. Still, their lightning-quick coordination remained a mystery. Even when hundreds of thousands of them flew in tight formation, they never collided. They could maintain speed and change direction in seven-tenths of a second, and no typical form of communication is possible at such speed. What’s more, each individual had a slower reaction time. Did they have some kind of invisible direct contact?
Yes, in fact they did. In the 1990s, it was discovered that there are special nerve cells in the brain that can transmit impulses for behaviours seen in others. These are called mirror neurons, and they’re why laughter, gestures and yawns can be infectious. They can also transmit barely noticeable movements in flocks of birds, because in social groups it’s important for each member to be in tune with others.
Did that mean each reaction perhaps even amplified the next? I thought of a phenomenon called the ‘hundredth monkey effect’, from a study of monkeys on an island in Japan. The researchers fed them sweet potatoes, and one day a young female had an idea. She began to wash the sweet potatoes in the sea to remove the dirt, and gradually others copied her. Then something remarkable happened. Let’s say that it began when a hundred monkeys had adopted the behaviour. Suddenly, other monkeys on nearby islands also began to wash sweet potatoes.
Around the same time, something
similar had been observed among birds. In the 1950s, milk bottles in England came with flimsy aluminium tops. The milk was delivered in front of each house every morning, and soon the blue tits of London learned that they could peck their way through the tops to reach the uppermost layer of cream inside. It didn’t take long for all the blue tits of England to learn the trick.
It seemed as if, when an adopted behaviour reached a certain level of uptake, groups could both develop faster and change character, almost as if they had reached some critical mass. In his book of essays entitled Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti described how a flock of people could suddenly transform into a mob. Similarly, they could be swept up by ideas and cultural movements. I myself had seen how poets could change course as a group, like starlings, even though their poetry was about individuality. I had even written a book about it.
There was something about group psychology that I found both gripping and disturbing. It reminded me of two dreams I’d had as a child. In one, I was flying free with my arms stretched out and my legs tucked beneath me, an archetypical fantasy of flight. In the other dream, however, I was watching some sort of aliens inject people with a similarity serum. Everyone who received an injection wanted to convince me that the transformation felt good, but to me the encroaching uniformity was a nightmare. I didn’t know if what scared me was the regimentation or the loss of control. I just knew that, like the squirrel, I wanted to preserve my integrity, and, like the birds, I wanted to fly free.
But the question was, of course, just how free they could be.
There is a dynamic at play between freedom and unity, solitude and togetherness, and birds provide great evidence of it. In the midst of their winged existence they are marked by the changing seasons, the stamp of their environment and the genes of past generations. They also look to each other for wayfinding and protection. On the cliffs at Stora Karlsö I had seen thousands of guillemots crowding close together, the better to avoid being taken by a bird of prey, and as their neighbours dived into the sea they also indicated where the fish were.
At the same time, they were all unique, and every bird could find its own egg among fourteen thousand others. Each newly hatched chick could also recognise its parents’ calls amid the deafening racket. It had heard them through the shell before hatching and could pick them out among thousands of others.
Everywhere, the same phenomenon. Hardly noticeable nuances set each egg, each bird, each song apart, for life is borne upon a billion existences with fates beyond all classification. It wasn’t visible in the migrants’ autumn formations in the sky, but it certainly made up for it when they returned in the spring. At that point the group cohesion from the journey had vanished and their communication changed character. The same air that had carried flocks of birds was now full of territorial songs meant to keep males of the same species away.
For the song was not just about species. It combined an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ – a first and last name of sorts – and that ‘I’ now had to blossom with tiny nuances that would prompt a female to choose one singer over others. Then his own personal nature might eventually introduce more variations into the entire species – into the ‘we’.
It touched my heart to hear this choir of birdsong, with each one blaring out his own fragile ego. Even the modest trill of the blue tit thought itself to be the centre of the world. Then again, why not? The eternal crescendo of the Big Bang, after all, began as a fist-sized centre of all possibility. So why couldn’t a few simple tones also have meaning?
Does a song say more than ‘Here I am’? I’d learned to identify birds’ songs with the help of mnemonics. In these Swedish phrasebooks, the yellowhammer, for instance, spoke English: A piece of bread and no cheese. These little jingles provided a rhythm but hardly the meaning, nor was the sound really captured by the combinations of letters cited. The blackbird’s song is definitely something other than true truly true tee tee.
Birds communicate with tones, of course, and we belong to a relatively tone-deaf species. We can’t hear overtones or the 750 sounds a wren can utter in one minute. Even the chaffinch’s song has subtleties we can only hear when a recording is played ten times slower than normal.
What’s more, birds have a different sort of throat than we do; their syrinx can produce more than one tone at a time. In Greek mythology, Syrinx was a nymph who escaped the lustful Pan by transforming into some reeds. They sang when he huffed breath across them in frustration, and he cut them to make a set of pan pipes that could play several notes at once. A bird’s syrinx can create rapid-fire, complex sounds in a single breath, with no audible break, thanks to the air sacs that take up a third of their body and their respiration rate of twenty breaths per second.
It seems that beauty is also important to birds. When they sing successfully, their bodies can even reap a chemical reward in the form of dopamine and oxytocin. This is especially true when they sing their autumn songs, which are not meant to mark territory or attract mates but only exist for their own sake.
And they’re not the only ones to enjoy these sounds, of course. When my own forefathers, a hundred thousand years ago, developed throats that could shape a voice, it was birdsong they wanted to imitate. The oldest known instruments are flutes that were often made of bird bones. Later, when words arrived, only poetry could produce something related to the tone, rhythm and resonance of song, for poetry has roots in music. Greek poetry was originally set to music, so Aristotle found the rising tone of iambs fit for a dance.
So what did Aristotle think as he walked around Lesbos listening to birds? Did he think they captured something of what he had written about, such as poetry, the heavens, the soul and the brevity of life? Perhaps he compared birdsong to his own Poetics, as if in a grammar of musical notes?
I would have loved to discuss this with him. He would surely have been interested in what researchers have discovered about the effects of tone. For instance, the cries one might hear from dog owners and parents of small children alike can express different things in two notes. Abrupt tones can serve as a warning or admonishment when they fall (Bad boy!), but if they rise they become an order (Come here!). Longer, gentle tones urge calm when they fall (There, there!), but are encouraging when they rise (Well done!). Emotion is carried in the tone of voice, and it can even speak to those who do not understand the words. Perhaps the rhythm, too, sends a subconscious reminder of what the mother’s heartbeat sounded like from inside the uterus. When she was calm, the heart beat slowly, and when she was upset or tense, it grew faster.
Aristotle truly wanted to understand the avian world. While his student Theophrastus immersed himself in lilies and marjoram, he pored over 140 species of birds, from the form and function of their beaks to the shades of colour in the egg and yolk. But, above all, he wanted to immerse himself in the life of a bird. He was the first who attempted to explain their annual migration, and he came to an astounding number of realisations about birdsong.
He noticed, for instance, that a bird didn’t have its song straight from the egg, but had to learn it. Today, we know this is the case. When chicks in a nest hear their father singing, networks of nerve cells blossom in their brains. If they don’t have a teacher, their song is unrecognisable. They must practise their melodies tens of thousands of times, always comparing with the memory of their father’s song. Even so, the final product can sport small individual traits.
Even humans have taught chicks to sing. In the 19th century, German foresters stole young bullfinches from the nest and persistently whistled melodies as they fed the babies. And surprisingly enough, the young adopted those whistled tunes, even though they might be fragments of folk songs or a bit of some classical piece, and even though bullfinches aren’t generally big singers. Starlings are even better at imitating melodies; in his time, Mozart had a tame starling that learned to whistle the theme from one of his piano sonatas.
The best imitators, though, are parrots. I
n the wild they’re very social and communicative, and among humans they can copy not only melodies and instruments but also tone of voice and sentences. It seems Aristotle had some experience with them, in fact, because he pointed out that alcohol made them unusually cheeky. Had he perhaps shared a glass of retsina with a parrot on Lesbos? Even if it wasn’t exactly an exchange of ideas on par with the Academy at Athens, he was sensitive to the fact that other species could have a language. In this, too, he was a pioneer.
The gift for language is most evident in the grey parrot – according to The Guinness Book of World Records, one of them mastered eight hundred words. Still, the most famous example is the grey parrot named Alex. Researcher Irene Pepperberg taught him a basic version of English for a very specific reason. She wanted to demonstrate that birds could understand abstract concepts and complex questions.
Since birds lack lips, Alex had a hard time pronouncing ‘p’, but soon enough he had mastered about a hundred words that could be used to test him. He had no trouble identifying fifty objects, seven colours, five shapes and various materials. He understood numbers up to six, as well as ‘zero’ or ‘none’. He could differentiate between concepts like ‘bigger’ and ‘smaller’, ‘the same’ and ‘different’. He could also express emotions, and when he didn’t want something he gave a firm ‘no’. When he did want something, he could use words creatively. He called an apple a ‘banerry’, because it tasted like a banana but looked like a cherry. To describe a cake, he invented the word ‘yummy-bread’.
He had learned words by observing two research assistants that sat in front of him and asked each other for various objects. To help him better identify with them, they tried to sit in bird-like positions, but Alex even adopted the researchers’ replies meant only for each other and used them in the proper way. Although human words are not birds’ speciality, they did give some insight into Alex’s sensitive brain. He successfully showed that birds can comprehend abstract concepts and complex questions.