Life on the West Island - Singing like a bird

A little over a year ago, a good friend of Life on the West Island, a widow who lives alone, received a birthday gift of a beautiful little blue budgerigar in a cage. For reasons best known to her, she named the tiny bird Paulie, and for a year she has been attempting to teach him to speak, saying “Hello Paulie” many times a day to her feathered friend. So far, he has not replied, but we believe he might just be bored.

So, when we visit, we greet him with a question: “Hello Paulie – how are you feeling today – poorly?” This has so far also failed to elicit a response, so we have switched to Plan B. Now, we are trying to teach him to say “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” which we assume he will find more interesting. We usually sing him the song, which gets him jigging from foot to foot (or is that claw to claw?) but apart from the occasional squawk, he has not got his beak around this stupendous word. Each time we leave, we sing the full song to him as we pass his cage, ending with that well-known final verse with which you are no doubt familiar:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, SUPER-CALI-FRAGI-LISTIC-EXPI-ALI -DOCIOUS!

So far, no success, but we have high hopes for the future.

Back at home, we awake most days to the glorious dawn chorus of native birds from the Landcare garden adjoining our house, where lately the kookaburras have been prominent. In spring 2023, we endured many weeks of raucous racket as a mother Laughing Jackass attempted to teach her baby the distinctive cry, with his responses ranging from the rasping of a chainsaw to the cry of a drowning sailor to the clanking engine of a hot rod. It seemed that junior might never master the art of laughing like an audience member at a stand-up comedy festival.

But this spring, the baby was back, joining his mother in uproarious laughing chorus every morning. Better still, he and his mother have stationed themselves near the beehives in our community garden, protecting the bees and discouraging the resident redbelly black snakes from harassing the large numbers of gorgeous golden skinks which scavenge the gardens for insects and morning tea crumbs.

All of this got us to thinking about bird song. How and why do birds sing? And how do baby birds learn the distinctive songs of their species? These might seem like mundane questions, but after a modicum of research, we discovered that the answers are varied and quite complex.

The answer to why birds sing is quite mixed. In essence, most birds have some kind of sound-making ability, and they vocalise for a variety of reasons. These include advertising their claimed territories; attracting a mate; deterring predators; and making alarm calls to warn other birds of imminent danger. Kookaburras, for example, use their raucous laughter for all four of these reasons, although most prominent is their deterrence of competition by warning other kookaburras of the boundaries of their territory. Some birds, such as magpies, use both warning calls and swooping to keep intruders away from the young in their nests.

Then there is the question of how birds produce their melodious songs. The website Ornithology gives the following brief explanation:

Birds generate sounds from a structure called the 'syrinx', which is located at the junction of the two bronchi (air passages) in the respiratory tract (breathing organs). The syrinx is controlled by pairs of muscles. Generally, bird species with more muscle-pairs produce more complex calls. The songbirds, also known as passerines, possess between four and nine of these muscle pairs and make the longest and most elaborate calls.

Most people will have heard and be able to identify the very distinctive calls and songs of many native birds. These might include the screeches of galahs, the tingling sounds of bellbirds and the glorious carols of magpies. In fact, birdwatchers have classified birdsongs into categories including cacklers, hooters, carollers, cooers, screechers, whistlers, trillers, squeakers and many more. And they can identify many species sight unseen just from their calls and songs. But this begs the question – how do birds learn to sing in concert with others of the same species?

In essence, it seems that some young birds inherit an innate ability to replicate the basic calls of their species but learn the more complicated songs from listening to and copying their parents and other adult birds of their species. But this is not universal. Some birds raised in isolation from others of their species have this ability, while others raised in areas with a preponderance of other species may mimic the songs of the dominant birds. Research at Indiana University concluded: [bird] songs are learned for song-learning species (oscine passerines), and do not develop normally in social isolation, just as young human children will never develop linguistically past the 'babbling' phase without exposure to language.

It is believed that in many cases, particular older birds act as “mentors” to the young, perhaps rewarding them for good singing efforts with food or displays of pleasure such as waggling wings or performing small dances. This is in some ways parallel to human learning – we teach our young to talk and sing in quite similar ways. But how often have you heard someone say, “I just can’t sing?” Maybe they missed out on having a mentor, just like the baby kookaburra before his mum gave him lessons!

So, if you spy a young West Island budgerigar in a cage and would like to encourage him to talk, just keep repeating supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! Sooner or later, we will prove that birds can be taught to talk. But will humans ever be able to teach a nightingale chick how to sing liked a bird? Maybe not…