Mozart's Starling

by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

  Little eight-holed bird flutes called flageolets became popular among those with the leisure to train their birds in song, a fashionable hobby. (Mozart would absolutely have known about this trend, but it is unlikely that, as a professional composer with a houseful of fine instruments, he would have deigned to purchase one of the popular flutes.) In 1717, The Bird Fancyer’s Delight was published in London, a slender book of tunes “properly compos’d within the compass and faculty of each bird,” with a few tunes for each of eleven species, including three for the starling.

  The pieces for starlings in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight are decidedly un-starling-esque, composed in a straight G major or F major and rolling along prettily and predictably, with no flights of starling fancy whatever. I have performed them for Carmen on various instruments—violin, piano, harp—and asked my daughter to play them on Carmen’s favorite instrument, the cello. Carmen does what she always does when we play music for her: she tilts her head attentively, and curiously. She is, as ever, a good listener. When music she loves comes on the stereo or is performed live on one of the household instruments, she sings along exuberantly. But with these tunes, she offers nothing more than a polite little squeak here and there, and perhaps a perfunctory whistle and wing fluff. She is unimpressed.

  I can’t imagine that eighteenth-century starlings would have displayed any more interest in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight than Carmen does, but bullfinches proved to be apt pupils of the tunes and learned their songs readily. Bullfinches are fat, handsome little birds topped with oil-black caps and gray backs that are set off against unusual persimmon-colored breasts. In Germany, bullfinches were captured in groups and taught to sing for show and for sale. The popular method of professional bird trainers was to keep the young birds in complete silence and darkness, often without food, so their senses would be formed by nothing but the tutored tunes. Some trainers even blinded their birds with hot metal spikes. This kind of “music by torture,” as composer David Rothenberg called it in his excellent Why Birds Sing, was often successful with the gifted bullfinches. William Cowper’s 1788 poem “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s Bullfinch” attests:

  And though by nature mute,

  Or only with a whistle blessed,

  Well-taught, he all the sounds expressed

  Of flageolet or flute.

  Those that survived the abuse and sang well commanded high prices in the shops. Star, worth just a few kreuzer with his bits of mimicked motifs, would have been considered a musical hack by comparison. At least at first glance.

  Among the birds commonly kept for song, only the starlings and mynahs were true mimics. It’s an important distinction. Most songbirds possess an inherited ability to learn the songs unique to their own species, usually sung by the male, most often during breeding season. This spring song is a proclamation of breeding readiness, and a strong, exuberant song helps to attract a mate and declare and defend a nesting territory. If you take a walk in the woods with a good birder in the right season, she will be able to announce the identity of the birds singing high and invisibly in the leafy trees based solely on their song. Most passerines learn their species’ song when they are young, so they are ready for the breeding season the year after their birth. In the autumn we can hear the young males of vocal species like house finches or white-crowned and white-throated sparrows singing wobbly versions of their songs—beginning practice for the spring. Sweet sounds. And for most of these birds, there is a learning window; if they do not learn their species’ songs in the first year or so of life, they are unlikely to learn them at all. Some birds raised in captivity will be able to sing a version of their species’ song, usually not a very good one, but many need the live tutoring they receive in the wild from older males. And if captive birds are introduced to another song instead of their own species’ song during this sensitive song-learning window, some will learn that song instead, which means that for some species, the song is learned rather than innate. These birds have an inherited tendency to learn the song they are exposed to most often when very young, just as the trained pet bullfinches did, as long as it is in the vocal range of their usual species’ song.

  This is very different from the true mimicry we see in starlings. Mimics do sing a song unique to their species (in the case of the starling, this includes a long series of teakettle whistles, clattering, and shrieks that many are reluctant to term a song). But true mimics like starlings do something else too: they imitate sounds from their environment—novel and improbable sounds that lie far outside of the usual explanation for birdsong. They appear to select these sounds at will; we can attempt to teach starlings sounds and tunes, and they will turn their nose up at some and latch onto others. They are mysteriously discerning and certainly have no regard for what we want them to mimic. Meredith West thought her birds had failed to learn anything from words and songs she’d played them on cassette tapes until she discovered one of them mimicking the hissss of the recording tape between phrases.

  This kind of true mimicry is uncommon. Passerine mimics include the starlings and mynahs, the corvids (jays, ravens, magpies, crows), and mockingbirds. Outside of the passerines, parrots are the most famous and gifted mimics. All these birds will imitate other birds and animals, environmental sounds, musical motifs, and human voices. While a young bullfinch can learn to sing a song in its impressive native range, unlike a mimic, it cannot imitate random and novel phrases.

  Mimicry indicates a sophistication in relationship to sound and involves a plasticity of behavior and consciousness that goes far beyond the instinctive. New research at Duke University suggests that the brains of parrots display a unique genetic pattern. The area of the brain associated with vocalization is surrounded by another layer, or shell, of ultra-specialized neurons for sound recognition and creation—a “song system within a song system,” as the researchers put it. This may be true for the brains of non-parrot mimics as well.

  Humans, ever self-absorbed, homed in on the capacity of certain birds to imitate our own speech right away, and it became one of the first areas of avian vocal research. Pliny the Elder kept magpies alongside his starlings. He noticed how eager the birds were to learn new words and how, once fixed on a word, they would work and fuss over it until it was perfected. Carmen certainly does this. One of the first phrases she chose to mimic among those oft heard in our home was Hi, honey! The word honey came out rickety and birdish and strange for days, but she’d turn it over and over on her tongue. And when she had it? She proclaimed it loudly and, to all appearances, even joyfully—not shyly, as when she was still perfecting the sound. Pliny declared that a magpie who has trouble learning a word will suffer such angst over his failure that he will die of it! He mused wonderfully: “They get fond of uttering particular words, and not only learn them but love them and secretly ponder them with careful reflection, not concealing their engrossment.… It is an established fact that if the difficulty of a word beats them this causes their death.” Secretly pondering? Perhaps. But Carmen, I hope, is not so angst-ridden.

  In spite of Pliny’s early start on the subject, and even after centuries of study, mimicry in birds is little understood. No single theory applies for all birds, and there are elements of mimicry that defy explanation altogether. The classic theory with starlings is that males use mimicry in the main to impress females. As a female starling, Carmen is not supposed to be a gifted mimic or songster. But living with a female starling, I can heartily attest that they create many of the same song elements that males do, and obviously they can be capable mimics. I was shocked and alarmed, though, when in April of Carmen’s first year of life she stopped vocalizing. Completely. She didn’t just stop the incessant whistles and the Hi, Carmens and C’meres. It was every single little peep. I freaked out. I coddled her, sang to her, exhorted Claire to set up her cello next to Carmen’s aviary and play her favorite Bach suites, with which she had always loved to sing along. Nothing. While I fretted about how I had failed as a starl
ing-keeper, I developed two theories. First, I thought that as a social bird, Carmen might be depressed in her life without starling companionship, that maybe her vocal and social skills had slowly been withering away and I was too dull to notice until she stopped talking altogether. I continued to spend extra time with her, added more mirrors to her habitat so she could keep company with her own image when alone, played tapes of starling vocalizations, and left her listening to her favorite bluegrass music when I had to leave. Nothing. Not one little tweet. She was as friendly and tame as ever, but she didn’t make a sound for nearly three whole months.

  During this time, I worked out my second theory. This was the season that, were she not living in a house, Carmen would have been nesting. Even though she had no mate, no nest, not even an artificial nest box, and even though she did not lay eggs, she might still have been overcome with the biological imperative to keep her nonexistent nest and nestlings safe by remaining absolutely quiet. Her mate, if she’d had one, would accomplish the necessary scolding and chest puffing required to guard the nest from interlopers or predators. Her job was to be silent and still.

  I granted that this was a more likely hypothesis, but it still seemed improbable. She was so far removed from the nesting process, why would this one behavioral imperative take over? And yet, why should it be any different from the other physiological changes associated with the seasons that she was displaying? Her legs became lighter pink, her bill changed from dark to bright golden yellow—both signs of breeding readiness. Perhaps this silence was simply seasonal? I did what I always do when Carmen’s behavior baffles me: I threw binoculars around my neck, grabbed a notebook, and headed out into the field—in this case, my urban neighborhood—to see what the wild starlings were up to. Sure enough, the male birds were in full-voiced territorial glory, and the females were hidden in their nests, silent as stones. This gave me modest hope.

  Finally, in July, just when I was beginning to despair of ever hearing her voice again, I padded down to make my morning coffee and heard Hi, honey! “Carmen!” I ran over to her aviary, but she was nonchalant, as if nothing had ever been amiss. Then she broke into a long, discordant whistle, and over the next few days she returned to her full, spirited voice. This was just when her brood of nonexistent chicks would be fledged and gone, giving her no further need to be secretive and hiding.

  If you look into starling-vocalization research, you’ll find papers with titles like “Temporal and Sequential Organization of Song Bouts in the Starling.” This one describes the function of mimicry as purely mate attraction and makes no mention whatever of female voices; every single bird studied was male. Or there is “Song Acquisition in Sturnus vulgaris: A Comparison of the Songs of Live-Tutored, Tape-Tutored, Untutored, and Wild-Caught Males.” Males. The study methods make sense; in most passerine species, while females make various chips and calls, it is the males that do all the true singing, so naturally the study of singing starlings has focused on males during their peak singing time—spring and summer, the months that, as Carmen taught me, female starlings go silent. No wonder the females’ vocal capacity is not just underestimated, but almost entirely unknown.

  I spoke to Meredith West about the skewed view of female starling voices. Her study was unique in that more than half the birds involved were female. This was just the luck of the draw—it’s hard to sex baby starlings, and they took what they got. In the end, this was fortunate. While it wasn’t something West set out to prove, her work uncloaked the extraordinary vocal prowess of female starlings. She agreed with my finding that female starlings could be as vocal and gifted mimics as males, especially when they are in a social group (like a family) with whom they want to interact.

  Both male and female starlings invite researchers to expand on the classic explanation for mimicry. Sure, there is a role in pair-bonding, and males do seem to take the lead in using mimicry to attract a mate. But once the pair bond is secure, mimicry on both sides appears to be a way of maintaining intimacy between mates. Through the seasons of the year, mimicry continues in both sexes, even though males and females often split into separate flocks; it’s a form of connection and belonging among flock-mates, of environmental awareness and participation. I am certain that there is more going on with both male and female starling communication and consciousness than we realize, but so much of this understanding cannot be learned in the lab, or even in the field, where we experience the habits of starlings in fits and starts. It can be learned only by the rare privilege of living in constant contact with a wild bird.

  Carmen fluffed after a bath and surveying her world. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

  Just recently Carmen added a new trick: meowing like the cat. Delilah appeared entirely unamused. Tom, Claire, and I all looked at one another, and Claire sighed. “It was bound to happen.” From the next room, we can’t tell the two apart. Delilah’s food bowl is near Carmen’s aviary. Unfortunately, this means that the meow Carmen has learned is not some sweet, purry, happy meow, but a crabby-cat Feed me! meow, the one our fat Delilah makes while circling her bowl, announcing her firm belief that it is mealtime. As usual with a new sound, Carmen worked on it, perfected it, and then mixed it into her repertoire—those bouts of singing where she throws all the mimicked sounds she knows into one long string. She would, as she did with other sounds, single out the meow and call it at seemingly random moments. And, also as usual, she did something else that took us way too long to comprehend.

  Tom noticed it first. He walked into the kitchen and Carmen looked at him and said, Hi, Carmen! Then Delilah walked in, and Carmen looked at her and said, Meow! At first we thought it had to be chance, but it has happened too many times, too consistently. Carmen greets us, human and cat, each in our own language.

  Carmen has learned that Hi, Carmen is a greeting, and she uses it as one. But what about that C’mere? This phrase, in the context of Carmen’s life, usually means we are going to hang out together. I open her cage, say, “Come here,” and hold out my hand. What about those times that I am in the next room, and I hear her call, C’mere? Is it a signal of desire? Does she want me to come there? I would not suggest that she has any sense of the grammatical structure of the words, or even that she recognizes them as words, as compared to environmental sounds. But given what else she has taught me about the way that starlings understand context, it is altogether possible that she has learned the cause-and-effect relationship between the sound of C’mere and the result—my presence, her favorite thing.

  I realize that this might sound far-fetched. We are talking about a bird, and such complexity of consciousness exceeds what we typically imagine birds to be capable of. But really, what I am suggesting is analogous to the dog who carries its leash over to its person and looks up expectantly. Leash equals hope of a walk. Why couldn’t Carmen’s C’mere not equal the hope of Lyanda coming over to the aviary? This question presses the boundaries of what we know about avian consciousness and human-bird communication, yes, but it is past time for such pressing. For so long, birdsong has been considered a function of breeding and territoriality. But the earth and its beings are extravagantly wild, full of unexpected wonders. It is time to turn from our textbooks and listen to the birds themselves.

  Carmen’s influence on my never-ending life pilgrimage in the natural world is profound. I find that when I walk into the world these days, I cannot help but say “Hi” to the starlings I see, and all the other birds too. I am so accustomed to Carmen’s friendliness, I almost expect that one of them will fly to my shoulder and say Hi back. Writing on her blog Myth and Moor, author, artist, and folklorist Terri Windling reminds us, “Many an old story begins with the words, ‘Long ago, when animals could speak…,’ invoking a time when the boundary lines between the human and the animal worlds were less clearly drawn than they are today, and more easily crossed.” Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an opening for a tale; not “Long ago, when animals could speak,” but “Long ago, when people could li
sten.” I look back to my naive early notion that I would obtain a starling to study in support of my own ideas, the story I thought I wanted to tell. But when I manage to hush my own voice and just listen, I discover that Carmen has become not just part of the story, but the storyteller, whispering in my ear, telling me what needs to be written, to be spoken, to be sung into the world.

  Five

  THE STARLING OF VIENNA

  When Carmen was young—able to fly but still fat and gray-feathered—she used to explore our house courageously. She’d fly around every room and liked to sit high atop bookshelves, or lamps, or chandeliers, surveying the scene. Nowadays she will come when she’s called—or sometimes she will, anyway. I’ll hold out an arm and call her name, and though she will ponder for a moment whether or not to do as she’s asked, she will most often decide in my favor. Baby Carmen did no such thing.

  As songbirds feather out, bits of downiness remain here and there among the new feathers, and the last of this to fall away is the one little tuft over each eye. A bit of downy fluff sticks out there, like an old man’s eyebrows, giving the young birds a half-adorable, half-grumpy look. Carmen, with her brows fluttering, would gaze down at me from the top of some high cupboard when it was time for her to go in for the night. I’d hold up my arm hopelessly. “Come on, Carmen! Come on down!” She’d just look sweetly about, as young birds do. Finally I would pull over a stool and risk my life climbing sock-footed onto the counter. When I held my hand close to Carmen, she’d happily hop on.

  Our house was built in the 1920s. Its most prominent features are wide fir moldings and high airy ceilings. The floor plan is circular; kitchen to hall to living room to dining room to mudroom, and back to kitchen again, with wide archways between each room. When Carmen was just beginning to fly, I’d help her practice by running in circles around the main floor. She would follow me, flying behind like a little kite. When she (or I) got tired, we’d take a break and she’d plop on my shoulder for a rest. Then I’d start running again, and she’d leap back into flight.