When she started to exhibit this behavior at just five weeks old, I began paying more careful attention to the other juvenile starlings in the neighborhood, those just Carmen’s age, and realized that though they weren’t feeding themselves yet, they were using this adult feeding action to explore their world. Even more intriguing, I observed that adult starlings consistently do this too—explore objects that they likely do not recognize as food sources by this peck-then-open-bill gaping behavior. It’s fascinating to watch.
This morning Carmen flew out of her aviary and onto my arm, where she promptly began to explore the folds of my sleeve, investigating every little crease and crinkle, then moving on to the spaces between my fingers and opening them, one by one. I like to hold my fist tightly closed to get her riled up and give her something to do. She raises her hackles and chirps crossly as she pries at my knuckles. It’s so much fun to pester her. She attempts to make gape holes in flat pieces of paper, the spaces in a woven rug, locks of hair—anything, everything.*
I figure that since I snatched a starling from its nest, no matter how unwanted it might have been in the larger scheme of things, I should give that starling as good a life as it can have. The opportunity to investigate the world by opening things with its bill is clearly a key to maintaining all the elements of starling social intelligence: curiosity, involvement, exploration, playfulness, mischief. To keep Carmen’s starling-faculties sharp, I provide her with plenty of gaping opportunities throughout the day. One of her favorite treats is applesauce, which I offer in a little dish covered with foil. The thing about starlings is that when they are with you, they don’t want to play with toys or eat things on their own; they want to play and eat with you. So I hold Carmen’s applesauce in my hand while she jumps on my thumb and pokes holes in the foil or lifts the corners to get to the yummy fruit. Then I cover it up, and after a disgruntled squawk, she does it again. I hide a grape in my fist so she has to find it through my closed fingers. When she does, she eats the grape by opening it with her gaping motion though the hole on top, where the stem was, rather than pecking at it. I give her toys that she can gape into—origami cranes, sponges, snail shells. I cover the bottom of her aviary with multiple layers of newspaper so she can lift and explore them, opening the folds, making little tents, and crawling beneath them, sometimes to my great distress—where has she gone? When I call “Carmen,” she peeks out one side, as playful as a puppy.
Carmen gaping for applesauce. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)
I love introducing this goofy, pretty, smart bird to my friends, knowing that she brings to everyone, as she has to me, a renewed sense of the raw beauty and intelligence in all of life, accessible only when we are able to strip away our preconceptions. “I hate starlings,” a guest will tell me. I let Carmen out of her aviary. She lights on my hand, stands in her shining feathers, and sweetly tilts her head. And I ask my guest, “Do you hate this starling?”
For perspective, I contemplate Mozart, who lived more than a hundred years before starlings had been purposely introduced anywhere, at a time when the human relationship to nature was a subject of philosophical and literary thought but long before anyone had an inkling that ecology would become a subject of study. Mozart lived in a place where starlings were native and thus valued as a providential part of the natural world, a place where their beauty was admired and their voices were appreciated. Even today, starlings are valued in Europe, where their numbers are declining due to the loss of agricultural lands. In England and other parts of Europe, this decline has even led to worry over the birds’ welfare—they are officially listed as a species of concern. Mozart’s relationship to Star, and that of the friends he introduced to the bird, were unclouded by a hovering hatred for the species.
The place we are left to inhabit in our thinking about starlings is a complicated one, but one that we are equal to. Carmen and her kin invite us to experience the poetic dissonance and multilayered understanding that is one of the hallmarks of our creative human intelligence. Starlings are shimmering, plain, despised, charming, collectively devastating, individually fascinating. We have the capacity to realize that while a species may be ecologically undesirable, the individuals of the species are just birds. Beautiful, conscious, intelligent in their own right. Innocent. Do I want starlings gone? Erased from the face of North America? Yes, unequivocally. Do I resent them as aggressive invaders? Of course. And do I love them? Their bright minds, their sparkling beauty, their unique consciousness, their wild starling voices? Their feathers, brown from one angle, shining from another? Yes, yes, I do.
“There is another world,” Paul Éluard wrote, “but it is in this one.”* One world is marked by a bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon—a kind of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something wondrous. But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” We decide, moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. Certainly we get no encouragement from what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the “overculture.” It cannot be assessed by the standardized cultural criteria of worth—measures that can be labeled with a sum or a statistic or even, perhaps, a word. Receptivity to wonder is not economically productive, marketable, quantifiable. The rewards, also, stand beyond such calculation. But it is in such receptivity that we discover what draws us, and along with it our originality, our creativity, our soulfulness, our gladness, our art. Mozart found inspiration in the presence of a common bird. For us, too, the song of the world so often rises in places we had not thought to look.
Four
WHAT THE STARLING SAID
HIieeeiEEeee. Carmen’s first word was wobbly and uncertain. But it was a word. She’d said “Hi.” Right? Hadn’t she? Tom and I looked at each other, neither of us wanting to be the one to suggest that a random warbling was an intentionally formed humanlike sound produced by our four-month-old starling chick. But then she said it again, clear as the bright August sky. HIiiiiiiii. Hi. Hi. Tom and I grabbed hands and jumped up and down. “Hi!” we sang back. “Hi, Carmen!” Our baby had said her first word! We ran up to Carmen’s aviary and peered inside. “Hi, Carmen!” She hopped over to see us, turned her head as if to listen, and—as she always would in the future when we tried to get her to talk on request—fell completely silent. But as soon as we returned to the kitchen: Hiii! We looked back at her. Was she mocking us? Most likely not. She was just enjoying her new way of expressing herself, one that would become, far more than any of us could have imagined, an integral part of the life of our household.
It is a surprise to most contemporary Americans that starlings can talk, that they are gifted mimics of environmental sounds, other birds, music, and the human voice. In this they surpass crows and ravens and are on par with birds of the parrot family. But the fact of starling mimicry was common knowledge in other times and places. Shakespeare clearly expected his sixteenth-century audiences, a hundred and seventy years before Mozart, to understand the reference in Henry IV that inspired Eugene Schieffelin’s Central Park starling introductions: “I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak.” Most of Shakespeare’s audience were not aristocratic, or particularly literary, or even educated, yet if they had not known that starlings could talk, the plot point would have made no sense. And such knowledge is older still. In the first century, the Roman author, military commander, and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder raised starlings for study and recorded that Julius Caesar, among other early statesmen, also kept them and taught them to “parle Greek and Latin.” Disastrously for the starlings, it was believed in sixteenth-century Britain that if one used a silver sixpence to slit a starling’s tongue, the bird could be taught to speak more impressively.
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Soon after the Hi, we realized that, although Carmen had formed her first human word, it had not been her first act of mimicry. A couple of weeks earlier she had started making an odd sound, one we hadn’t heard from her before and that wasn’t in the innate starling repertoire of whistles and squawks that she was perfecting in her spare time. It was a quick up and down, an EEE-oo-EEE-oo-EE-oo. Three or four like that, in rapid succession. It sounded to me a little like the song of a common yellow-throated warbler, a bird that Carmen had never heard. Then, just a few nights after the Hi, I had poured myself a little glass of chardonnay and was using the Vacu Vin (the plastic pump apparatus that sucks the extra air out of a wine bottle through a rubber stopper) when I heard it: EE-oo-EE-oo-EE-oo! I stood, mouth agape, until I recovered enough to yell, “Tom! Tom, Tom, Tom!” He came running. “Listen!” And just as I started to lift the pump, Carmen joined in—Vacu Vin and starling almost indistinguishable. I’m sure this reflects poorly on me somehow; the first repetitive environmental noise my starling learned to mimic was the sound of me hitting the bottle!
Her vocabulary grew quickly over the next several months. Other than the initial hi greeting, we chose in the main not to attempt to teach Carmen particular words but to let her vocalizations unfold in tune with her life within our family. Constant favorites are Hi, Carmen; Hi, honey; and C’mere!—the short phrases we utter every day as we pass by her aviary or when we open the hatch and call her over to land on our shoulders. She is good at the kissy sound humans use when calling an animal—she makes three in a row, just as we do with her. Sometimes, when she’s not trying very hard, she sounds shrill and starling-ish when she imitates human words. Sometimes she sounds just like a feathery little person.
Meanwhile, Carmen continued to expand her household-sound repertoire. After the wine vacuum came the coffee grinder. Then the beeping of the microwave oven—pitch perfect. She integrated all of these sounds, as well as Kiss me! and C’mere! and Hi, honey, into her rambling song bouts. She would also often make the sounds individually, just calling them out one at a time and at random, or so I thought at first. It took me far too long—and I feel quite stupid about this—to notice something else, something startling and beautiful.
Carmen imitates the coffee grinder—an unpleasantly loud but accurate Whirrrraaaaah!—when I open the jar of coffee beans and pour them into the machine. Every evening I walk into the kitchen to grind the beans for the next morning. There is Carmen, eager to announce, first, the Ker-klunk of the coffee-jar lid as I set it on the counter, then Whiirrraaah! When I open the microwave door, she immediately interjects her eerily mechanical Beep! Beep-beep! And the wine-vacuum sound? When she hears the clink of the bottle.
All of this made me realize that, like these household sounds, the words she imitates are not called out at random. When I come downstairs in the morning, it is not the microwave or the kissing sounds I hear first, but the greeting—Hi, Carmen! Hi, Carmen! Hi, Carmen!—the first words I say to her each day. And when I stop to peek into her aviary? C’mere. All participatory, anticipatory, all involved, all cognizant of what is going on aurally in her world and what precipitates what. She is basically saying, I know what’s going on! I am part of this! I am filled with wonder. And with questions.
Meredith West is an ethologist emeritus at Indiana University and the lead author of an iconic 1990 Scientific American paper that explored the subject of Mozart’s starling and the relational capacities of starling pets. It was West’s paper that confirmed for me that the story I’d heard about Mozart’s pet was indeed based in fact, and her work brought to light the details of Mozart’s notebook for an English-speaking audience. She also kept starlings in her home so she could understand how Mozart fell for such a bird. But the heart of West’s work is really the aural complexity of starling vocalizations and the character of communication possible between starlings and humans. According to West, the vocal interaction we experience with Carmen is typical; West refers to it as a kind of social sonar or echolocation: starlings toss out sounds to see what comes back to them. Where for a bat the reward of echolocation is a meal of mosquitoes, for a starling the reward appears to be a sense of comfort in belonging. Carmen’s verbal and aural participation is a way of locating herself in her surroundings, which for a starling are not just physical but also social. Response from the world around her is essential.
In 1983, Meredith West and her colleagues carried out a pioneering study on starling mimicry. Seven starlings were captured as five-day-old nestlings, just like Carmen; four were females and three were males. West’s chicks were all hand-raised together in the lab until they were about thirty days old, at which point they were split into three groups. Each group went to live in a household with human caretakers, but all under different circumstances. A male and a female went to live in a home where, like Carmen, they were raised with constant human contact and treated as part of the family; they were often let out to fly free, were fed by hand, and were included in group conversations. They were sung to and whistled to. There was no attempt to teach the birds particular words or songs or to mimic any sounds that the starlings made except when doing so came naturally. Another male and female went to a home where the humans didn’t interact with them at all except for what little was necessary to keep them fed and their enclosures clean.
The last three birds went to live together on a screened porch in the same home as the first pair of birds, those that were living as part of a family. These screened-off birds could hear everything that the inside birds heard—the human voices, the singing, the vacuum cleaner—but people in the home didn’t approach them, talk to them as individuals, or handle them.
It turns out that among starlings that live with humans, Carmen is not alone in her eagerness to join the household’s conversation. In West’s study, all seven of the birds mimicked natural sounds, mechanical sounds in their environment, and other birds. But only the birds that interacted closely with humans mimicked human words and voices, and only these birds mimicked environmental sounds in the context of what their human caretakers were doing. West and the other starling-keepers in her study reported that their birds kept them constantly on their toes, readily mimicking a variety of sounds, most commonly greetings and good-byes (Hi, Good morning, Hey, buddy, Night-night, Go to your cage); attributions (Silly bird, You’re so pretty, See you soon, baboon, You’re kidding!); conversational fragments (Whatcha doing, Okay, I guess so, This is Mrs. Struthers calling); and household noises (cat meowing, dog barking, door squeaking, keys rattling, dishes clinking). Many people who live with starlings report becoming self-conscious about tics they never knew they had until their starlings mimicked them back: sighing, coughing, sniffing, tongue-clicking, odd little laughs. In Meredith West’s academic household, a resident starling would perch on the professor’s shoulder and mutter, Basic research, it’s true, I guess that’s right, and when someone else walked into the room, the bird would announce, I have a question! The implication is that mimicry has a rich and complex social aspect—that it’s valuable and useful for starlings to connect aurally with those they are most closely bonded to, whether that is another starling or a human.
West and her team also found that the family-raised birds imitated the cadence of human speech whether they were forming recognizable words or not, just like a human baby starts to sound like it is making words before it actually is—the bird version of baby talk. Carmen does this all the time. She will be rattling away, whistling and gurgling like a wild starling, and I’ll look at her and say, “What is all this noise?” She’ll stop the starling talk, tilt her head, and say with a perfect American English lilt, Why, it’s nothing. Say, that soup on the stove smells delicious. Why don’t you let me out and we’ll have a nice game of backgammon while it simmers. She doesn’t produce the actual words, of course, just the up-and-down cadence and intonation, almost exactly like my own.
It’s the same as a person imitating French or Chinese or some other language
that they don’t actually speak; it is easy to guess what language is being imitated even though the words are nonsense. When my family was over this holiday season, they kept telling me, “Carmen said, ‘Merry Christmas!’ I heard her!” She didn’t, but you could imagine it. She was just baby-talking household English. (And let me offer a piece of advice: never teach a starling to say “Merry Christmas” unless you want to hear it all year long.) Birds raised within earshot of humans but without close contact do not behave this way. Carmen’s vocalizations are relational, a kind of conversation. They are her way of being with us.
It’s kind of unnerving, actually, to be sitting alone in the living room on a dark rainy night, cuddled down by the fire with a book, and hear a little voice from the next room say with perfect inflection, C’mere! She sounds so hopeful, I can’t help getting up and walking over. “Here I am.” Carmen jumps to the front perch, puts her face to the wire, and we touch, nose to bill. “Go to sleep,” I tell her, and turn out all the lights.*
All of this makes me ponder the aural relationship between Mozart and Star. By Mozart’s time, the keeping and training of birds with good singing voices had become common among the European middle and upper classes, aristocracy, and even royalty. In the early 1700s, royal Parisian “supervisor of the woods” Hervieux de Chanteloup had a second job description: “guardian of the princess’s canary birds.” Most in demand were the bird species with vocal agility: canaries, bullfinches, linnets, East Indian nightingales (actually a kind of mynah), and starlings.
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