by Sylvia Torti
“He said that even the language changes; you lose the rhythm of your mother tongue.”
David stopped and turned to Anton. “I guess I’ve never thought about how hard it must be for you to be here.”
“That’s not what I meant, but it is really different,” Anton said.
“Since it wasn’t bird watching that got you into this sound business, and landed you in our foreign land, what was it?”
“Guitar. Classical guitar, and then later, physics.” He might also have said a house that was too quiet. “But there were birds in my past. My grandfather was a bird singing judge.”
“A what?”
“He lived in a village in the mountains and every spring he kept the custom of collecting a bird, a young one, and he raised it up for singing competitions. There are villages in the mountains where all the men come to coffee every morning with their birds. They set the cages on a long table and the birds listen and learn from each other. During a competition, the judge goes down the line of cages with a stop watch, timing how long each bird sings.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. My grandfather always had good birds, but the people loved him for his judging. His fingers clicked the stopwatch very quickly. He was fair and honest. He was always asked to judge.”
“What birds?”
“Nightingales, mostly. Finches too. Even after my grandfather went deaf, he judged, measuring the song by watching the beak.”
“What kind of finches? Were they bullfinches, as in Nicolai’s finches?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve heard about Nicolai and bullfinches, haven’t you?”
“I studied guitar and physics.”
“But still, how could you not know about Nicolai? He was German.”
“You are forgetting, David. I am not German. I am from Südtirol. Why do all you Americans think Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Südtirol are the same place?”
“Nicolai was a famous animal behaviorist,” David said. “Everyone should know about him. The bullfinches he studied have almost no song, just a who who sound, but if you take them young and train them, like Nicolai did in the 1950s, you can teach them complicated songs. Nicolai had them singing German folk songs, but the odd thing was that they always transposed the song up a half step. If the song was in F, they sang it perfectly, but in F#. The other strange thing was that the birds bonded only with Nicolai and his male assistants. After they were trained, he would sell them as pets, but the birds only sang for men. If bought by a woman, they became mute.”
“I understand,” Anton said. “They are afraid of saying the wrong thing.”
David laughed. “Right. With women, it’s usually better to say nothing at all.”
They arrived at the car. Each man knocked his salty boots against the tires and got in. Driving back along the causeway, David stopped and they got out to set up the telescope. There were small groups of ducks—goldeneyes and green-winged teals—along the shore, but the peak migrations had not yet started. Soon they would be seeing ibises, avocets, stilts, phalaropes, the birds coming along the north-south flyway, from Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico, stopping off at the lake for a little rest before continuing their travels north to nest and breed.
On the way home, the bird songs played again, only now David just listened to the songs, not bothering to say the names.
“So who is Ed, the guy who is better at birdsong than you?”
David waited a moment before he answered. “Edward Matheson III. The best birder ever known.” His fingers clenched hard on the steering wheel. “And, incidentally, the man who came between my wife Sarah and me.”
“Believe me,” Sarah was saying, “if a person develops a vocabulary for loss when they’re young, they’re pretty much immune as adults.”
Ed, who was driving, turned his head briefly away from the road and raised his eyebrows to Sarah who was sitting next to him in the front seat. Sarah ignored his challenge. Ed was back for two weeks to defend his dissertation, and the three of them were going on a camping trip for the first time. David sat in the back with the parrot Skinner calmly perched in his plastic green cage. It cocked his head at him and so David cocked his head back.
“It’s the difference between learning a language when you’re young versus when you’re old,” she said. “I’m not saying that it makes you immune to loss as an adult, just that you don’t stumble. Loss and grief don’t derail you if you’ve gone through it young.”
Ed downshifted and then pulled into the left lane to pass a truck. Skinner let out a loud squawk.
“See?” Ed said. “Skinner also thinks that’s bullshit.”
“Sounded more like he was agreeing with me,” she said.
“I’m wondering if it’s weird to be taking a bird on a camping trip,” David said.
“He needs to be out where he can hear other birds, not just cats and dogs,” she said.
“What if we lose him?” David asked.
“We’re not going to lose him. I’m not even going to open the cage.”
“We could tether him out. He’d be good bait for an eagle.” Ed was not fond of the parrot. He waited to feel the punch on his right shoulder. A smack from Sarah now and then was the only physical contact they shared.
“I was thinking he’d be better butterflied on the grill, a sort of appetizer,” David said.
Sarah turned to the back seat and spoke to the bird. “Don’t listen to them, Skinner. They don’t mean what they say.”
David and Ed had been on many such trips in the years since they’d met early one summer morning at the beginning of graduate school. David had been walking a trail in one direction, Ed was going the other way. Recognizing in one another the look of serious birders, they stopped, chatted, reviewed their lists and in the course of talking, realized that they were both grad students at the university. David in psychology. Ed in biology. Soon after, they began sharing an apartment, and whenever Ed was in town, going on bird watching trips to Northwest Florida, Big Branch Marsh and Corpus Christi, trips in which they left at nightfall and took turns driving through the dark. They birded from sunrise to early afternoon, compared their lists, and then slept a few hours before driving home again. In between, they worked on their dissertations. Ed flew to the tropics in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia to study birds. David stayed in Louisiana and put mice through their motions, ran them blindfolded through mazes, froze them, sliced open their brains.
David met Sarah a year after he met Ed. Having arrived early to class he took a front desk near the window in the classroom, hoping to spy an odd bird during lecture that he could later gloat about to Ed. He was staring out the window, watching for movement in the leaves when a woman behind him spoke.
“Would anyone be interested in sharing books this semester? Splitting the costs?”
He turned his head slightly, surprised by the sweetness of the voice, mildly southern, but far from the girlish lilt of the local women. When he turned to look back, he saw her legs first, long and tanned, and without thinking about whether he wanted to share books or not, his arm shot up.
Sometimes in class, he would hear her talking with others and only single words reached him, but that was enough to evoke images for him. He heard her say “Spanish dancer” and instantly had the image of a young woman with black shoes tapping on a wooden floor. When she said “swan,” he saw the ripple of smooth water as a white bird glided away. He had no idea what she was talking about or where the words fit into her conversation, but he realized that he’d stopped paying attention to the birds outside and was holding his breath.
Six months after meeting, they moved in together. At first, it was like the sharing of books, an economic and convenient arrangement. Ed, who was off in the tropics much of the time proving with his ears that indeed there were more bird species out there than people had believed, didn’t mind letting out his room. “I can use the extra cash. Besides, you two will start sleeping togethe
r and then I’ll get my room back.”
Ed was right about Sarah and David. And he was right about birdsong. There were roughly ten thousand species of birds on the planet, and of these, over four thousand were songbirds. Only one man in the world, Ed Matheson, could recognize every species by call or song alone. Despite their competitions, David had only awe for Ed, whose ear was tuned far better than anyone else’s. His ability to listen, assimilate and identify sound bordered on the super human.
“How do you do it?”
“Practice.”
David shook his head. “I practice too. It’s something else you’ve got.”
“A good memory maybe,” Ed said.
Ed could put a name on a singing bird in half the time it took David. He did it without thinking, as if his ears, brain and mouth were a computer, the hard disk chock-full of animal calls, the processing mechanism inhumanly fast, but Ed was more interested in the diversity of those sounds than in his own peculiar ability. “There is a funny feeling you get in the tropics,” he told David. “Every time you turn and walk a few more feet you see or hear another species. I mean, how did so many birds and so many different songs evolve? It’s eerie. I’m no mystic, but it borders on the spiritual.”
One time, Ed came back from Peru, thin but energized after having rediscovered the white-cheeked tody flycatcher, a small bird with big eyes—a bird that had been thought extinct for one hundred years. Ed opened the refrigerator and took out two beers, popped the tops and handed one to David.
“Imagine this,” he said. “A two-mile radius. In sixteen hours, me and Esteban saw or heard three hundred twenty-four bird species.”
“Okay, I’m imagining.”
“You can’t,” Ed said. “That’s the point. You have to be there to believe it.” He stopped talking and then finished his beer in one long gulp. David noticed that his face looked more weathered than before, older.
“It’s different from here, nothing like forests in Louisiana or Ohio, Washington or California,” Ed said. “It’s weird. You get up before dawn and go out. In the forest you feel vulnerable, part of the food chain even, but then at the end of the day, once you’ve washed up and are sitting reviewing your lists with a whiskey in hand, everything has flipped and you feel invincible. Maybe it’s the isolation. No electricity, no running water, no phones. Nothing keeping you in. Totally free. I don’t know, maybe it’s knowing that you could walk out into the forest, keep going, and no one would ever find you.
This was the first time Sarah had come with them on a camping trip. They pitched the tents, one for Sarah and David, the other for Ed, and put Skinner on the ground between them. The men woke at 4:30 a.m., sprayed themselves with mosquito repellent, looped binoculars over their heads and took off bird watching. In the woods at the crack of dawn, each man quietly moved around the other, using the same strategies, a step, a cocked ear to listen, a few more steps, a few more moments, checkmarks on paper. There was no need to speak, only a mutual nod when they’d both heard and recognized a song. Both experts, both talented, only unlike David, Ed was never wrong.
Sarah got up later, intending to spend the morning hours studying. She opened her folder and spread the papers on the picnic table. Skinner’s cage was next to her. The bird hopped onto his perch and then stepped toward the edge of the cage and peered out at her, as if asking her to open the door and let him out. When she tried to focus on the clinical study before her, the words blurred. A mosquito buzzed at her ear and she swatted it away. A drop of perspiration fell from her forehead onto the pages below. By afternoon, when the men returned, she was in her tent, flushed with fever. They packed up and drove back. At home, she was diagnosed with mononucleosis.
“I can’t believe this,” she said to David. “Two weeks before my exams and I get the virus you get from kissing in junior high.”
“Does this mean you’ve been kissing junior high boys lately?”
“I’m not sure what’s worse, the chills, fever, and muscle aches or the fact that I’m too tired to study and now I’m going to fail my exams.”
David stationed himself next to her bed, took the research paper from her hand and began to read out loud. She lay next to him, her eyes closed, listening to the outline of the experiments, the results, the conclusions. David offered commentary to each one, articulating exactly what she would have responded if she’d felt better. When he had to go back to the lab, Ed took his place, and during the days that followed, the voices of the two men intertwined, David’s melodic voice with Ed’s skeptical reading of psychology. The night before her exams, David looked up from his reading and saw that she’d fallen asleep. He set the paper aside. Sarah had read them all before, and would pass her exams effortlessly. Across-town he could hear the whistle of a train and then the rumble of boxcars powering down the rails. That was Sarah. Unveering. Sarah, he thought at the time, would always stay on track.
David wrote in his notebook. The theory of sexual selection is all about sex, which males get it and why. Theory says that if song is a signal that gives female birds information about a male’s merit, then it should cost him something. Food, time, energy, increased risk of predation. Nothing is free.
David stopped writing. He looked up from his desk and out the window. It was still dark outside and he was the only one in the lab. Cost. He’d been thinking lately of the cost of song. The tradeoffs between singing and not.
Often, standing in front of a classroom of undergraduates in an attempt to get them to see that they were animals too, he would apply the same logic to explain human mating behavior. Signal, he would tell them, is something like guys cruising the strip on Friday night. As such, not all cars are created equal.
“Listen now, ladies. You all are aware, I’m sure, that a BMW is worth more than a Ford, and by the sexual selection theory, the man who drives it earns more than his Ford counterparts.”
As he talked, he would reach into his pants pocket, remove his hand slowly, revealing his keychain, allowing the BMW sign to swing. “That is,” he would continue as they laughed, pausing long enough for them to become quiet again, “unless the man is in debt.” Here the comparison petered out. In nature, David reminded them, there was no debt. In nature, debt was equivalent to death.
He started to write again. For a bird, this theory means that all songs shouldn’t be equal. Better songs should cost more to sing, and males with these better songs should be superior in territory, health, genes, in some way that matters to the babies. But it wasn’t so straight-forward. How could you measure which songs were better? Some males, when trying to pair up with a female, sang several thousand times a day. Maybe time spent singing was like time spent cruising State Street—no matter what kind of car—only the really fit guys could afford the time. He put down his pen. Or the bums, he thought. No, it wasn’t black and white at all.
Measuring the cost of speech in humans was easy and the proverbial “talk is cheap” was about right. You stuck a plastic mask over a person’s nose and mouth and asked them to speak softly, then loudly, slowly, then quickly. You put them on treadmills, ratcheted up the speed and asked them to recite poetry while running. You corrected for air in and air out, measured oxygen and carbon dioxide. You got an answer. It cost almost nothing, no extra oxygen, to speak in a normal voice at a normal rate. Singing took some extra effort.
David heard the telltale whistle announcing Anton’s arrival at the lab, heard him settling into the day. He expected him to show up at his office door in a few minutes. This wasn’t the first time David had thought of cost. At night he lay in bed ticking through possible methods to measure cost in birds much like other people counted sheep. You couldn’t ask a bird to wear a mask and run on a treadmill. In graduate school he’d written in his notebook:
How much energy does it cost a male bird to sing his song?
Below that, in the margin, Sarah’s careful handwriting:
Less than it costs a female to lay an egg!
At one point i
n their relationship, she had begun to filch his notebooks and slip comments into the margins. He looked forward to finding her notes, these inside conversations that happened on top of or alongside other conversations they were having. She asked questions about his questions, and noted references for papers she thought might interest him. Sometimes, she’d draw portraits of owls, kingfishers or robins. Once she had printed: You’re the only one I really talk to.
Now they weren’t talking at all. David sensed Anton at the door and looked up from his notebook. “Good morning.”
“Rebecca’s not here?” Anton asked.
“Sick.”
Anton nodded. “Coffee in an hour?”
“Sounds good.”
Anton turned and left to set up a new bird for the thermistor experiment. Midmorning, he poured them both cups of coffee and slid one toward David.
“Funny how she doesn’t say much, but you feel her absence,” Anton said.
“Who?”
“Rebecca.”
David smiled. “You interested in the technician?”
“I was just making an observation.” Truth was, Anton was acutely aware that he was passing the day without the normal eager sensations that he felt upon seeing her.
“You’re right, though. She’s quiet.” David said. “I always find quiet women suspicious.”
“Suspicious? Maybe I don’t understand what the English word means.”
“No, not suspicious. That’s not the right word, just aberrant. You know: women talk, men listen?”
Anton laughed.
“Anyway, my advice is steer clear.”
“Why?”
David shrugged, took a sip of coffee. “You know I’ve been thinking about the one thing that no one has ever measured about birdsong.”
Anton raised his eyebrows.
“Cost. How much does it cost one of these guys to sing?”
“Can’t you just measure it?”
“How?”
“Oxygen consumption. Seems pretty trivial.”