I don’t have to step too far out my back door to know that some of my neighbors are – I’ll say this gently – disturbed. It’s evident in the way they bluster and flap and shriek the most outrageous things. Only recently have I learned that such behavior has a proper scientific name: ornithologists call it “countersinging.” The label is spot-on, as my rowdy neighbors are songbirds.
Dr. Jeremy Hyman of Duke University, avian biologist and animal behaviorist, has heard what I’m hearing. What’s more, he’s listened carefully enough to write an interesting – to me, at least – 2003 paper on countersinging: “Countersinging interactions…include singing matched song types and singing so as to overlap individual songs…. Several studies have documented that matched countersinging and overlapping are correlated with aggressiveness and readiness to escalate confrontations, suggesting that matching and overlapping are honest signals of aggressive intent.”
My backyard neighbors are essentially yelling at one another, trying to shout the competition down, to jam their rival’s signal. Eerily, much of what they’re saying sounds like human words or syllables, and often has been rendered as such by authors of birding guides.
The Tufted Titmouse takes up a cry that sounds for all the world like “Cheater, cheater, cheater.” I find that accusation offensive, as I am innocent. Besides, he has no proof.
My Carolina Wrens are prone to unwarranted panic: “Jeopardy, jeopardy, jeopardy!” Of course, it’s a false alarm.
There’s an anonymous libel being spread – anonymous, as I cannot identify the voice’s owner – that goes, “she HURTS you, HURTS you, HURTS you.” Not just slanderous, it smacks of misogyny. That call has even the experts stumped.
By an inquiry to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, perhaps America’s foremost repository of songbird savoir-faire, I am reliably informed that this time of year the woods are filled with immature birds that have not yet learned to vocalize in a refined manner. To my mind, the birds’ scholarship is faulty and I’ve just about abandoned hope that they’ll ever enjoy mature discourse.
The Towhee is the most annoying of all, prone to protracted spells of belligerent paranoia. Daily, he hurls himself against his own reflection in our kitchen’s bay window. Lunging repeatedly at the self he can’t recognize, he beats his wings against an imaginary peril only a bird brain could concoct. It sounds like someone’s lobbing tennis balls against the glass. Occasionally he’ll pause long enough to wrap his battered beak around the trademark refrain, “DRINK your TEEEEEEE…DRINK your TEEEEEEE.” Not a useful proposition, as I’m certain tea won’t help. I’m amused that he, of all birds, would recommend a beverage I associate with gentility.
In his 1928 book, The Outermost House, naturalist Henry Beston described the birds with whom his cottage shared the Cape Cod dunes as “…not brethren…not underlings [but] other nations caught with ourselves in the net of life and time [and] the splendor and travail of the earth.” For the most part, my little wooded Bestonia has splendor to spare, its colorful citizens flitting through a verdant lattice, threading among tendrils of light and shadow woven by low-angle sun through crisp autumn air. Great choruses of beguiling warbles and cheery, lyrical trills rise and fall as optimistic little neighbors transact their nation’s business.
It also has its share of “travail,” courtesy of a few pessimistic agitators with voices completely out of proportion to their message’s merit. They are ridiculous little hotheads whose songs and behaviors remain predictably rote – accusations, defamation, paranoia; confused flapping at invented threats while demanding that I drink my tea.
I can’t blame them – they’re just silly birds with a sort of hard-wired biological imperative to be cantankerous. They may actually be flattering me, says Jennifer Scales in a 2009 dissertation submitted at the College of Charleston. Scales correlates elevated levels of songbird aggression with the superior quality of their habitat. Measured by civic clamor alone, my Betstonia is a great nation indeed.
But I will say that occasionally, for their own good – because like Jeremy Hyman I’ve been carefully listening instead of just hearing – I have to step off the patio and wave my arms to shut them up. It’s when they’ve gotten a little too self-absorbed; inebriated, as Disraeli would say, with the exuberance of their own verbosity. It’s when, beyond the echo of their own quarrelsome voices, they have missed the distant cry of the approaching hawk.
