Bird language
Dear friends,
It is a glorious sunny morning, and my world is alive with birdsong. I’m sitting in the park, bathing in sounds of soft fluttering wings; tuning into all the different voices circling through the air and dancing in the tree branches above me. Some voices are intricate and melodic. Other voices are bright and cheerful. Others are high pitched and shrill. Somewhere behind me I hear the sharp, raucous squawking of the Hadeda “Har-dee-dar” Ibis. Some birds are chattering in groups on the lawn, while others are calling out in flight, their voices ringing with an echo of mystery.
As I listen, I wonder: What could I learn from birds, if I really tuned into their songs?
My curiosity is prompted by an interview I listened to recently with master tracker and nature mentor Jon Young. I’ve been interested in bio-acoustics and soundscape ecology for awhile, particularly through the work of Bernie Krause. And while I delight in being able to differentiate the voices of sunbirds and certain other bird species who frequent my backyard, I realise that I have also been thinking of birdsong rather too simplistically, as nature’s beautiful music.
Jon’s words invited me to look deeper. Interviewed by Alexa Firmenich on the Lifeworlds podcast, he described a childhood where his affinity for catching frogs, tracking animals, listening and sensing the natural world, was mentored and nurtured, in wonderfully contrasting ways, by an Irish grandmother and a Polish great-aunt. From there, he entered a 50-year mentoring relationship with the master tracker and author Tom Browne, Jr., and has himself throughout his career continued to mentor countless others in the skills and sensibilities of bird language, animal tracking and attunement to nature.
It was Jon’s Polish great-aunt who first told him that birds talk to us and tell us important things. In ancient, indigenous story traditions of the world, birds often play the part of messengers, auguries, harbingers and mediators between worlds, inspiring visions and allowing us to see beyond our horizons.
Joshua Michael Schrei encapsulates this in his uniquely poetic way, in an Emerald podcast episode dedicated to birds: ‘Each murmuration, each arcing flight invites stories, invites bodies to soar into imaginal spaces. All across the world, the myths are alive with birds, alive with the sound of flapping wings. The myths sing like nightingales, squawk like crows, dive like falcons, soar like eagles. In the myths, spirit birds fly. The myths rise like birds through the upper strata of the atmosphere into unknown heights, through the dome of sky, into the celestial spheres beyond. In the myths, in the dark surrounding forest at night, the sudden light of the firebird ignites. A spark is initiated, an idea is formed, a quest is begun. A space is opened up, an invitation given to fly…’
Indeed, the mythical symbolism of birds sings across the ages in a rich diversity of colour and song. But I’ll get back to that later.
Jon Young’s approach to bird language, as described to Alexa Firmenich, had a more direct, experiential quality. Spending time with indigenous San people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, he observed the fundamental importance of bird language to peoples’ daily lives. As he put it: ‘The birds do not lie. They don’t fabricate. They don’t interpret. They express purely, and your nervous system nourishes from that like a vitamin.’
Flying overhead, seeing with greater acuity over farther distances and with a higher perspective than those of us anchored to the ground, birds see it all. They tell it all too. From the youngest age, San children were learning to read the information streams of birdsong. The pied warbler would tell them if the lions were on the move. Other kinds of alarm calls might alert them to a venomous snake winding through the branches of a nearby tree. It was critically important to know the different kinds of bird calls, and to interpret their meanings correctly.
In the evenings, as Jon Young relates, men and women, children and elders, would gather round the fire to discuss what each person had seen and heard during the day, integrating all of their knowledge into a more holistic pattern of meaning for all the community to hold.
The San described their relationships with the animals in the environment as ropes. Were you for example to sit outside in your garden everyday and then start to build a relationship with a particular sunbird who visits, you would first have a thread connecting you to that animal. If the relationship were to grow over time, those bonds would strengthen. The thread would become a string, the string would become a cord, and eventually the cord would become a rope.
Jon for example described his rope with a wild turkey named Pete: ‘When Pete makes a sound, because of my bond I pay attention… Energy flows through the ropes, and they can be pulled in either direction. Pete can tug on me and I can tug on Pete.’
I know I am far from being the first modern human to wonder: how would it feel to walk through the landscape sensing all these intricate ropes of connection, with my mind and body so alert and alive, so exquisitely and immersively tuned in, weaving every chirp, every hum, every thrum, every buzz, every twitch in the grass into a larger pattern of meaning? What if I was so well connected with my environment that every snap of a twig or rustle in the bushes would feed me information, helping me to form an accurate story of what is happening in the landscape?
After a moment of sadness evoked by these thoughts, a brief mourning for all those ropes we moderns have severed or can no longer feel, I get curious how it would feel to activate new ropes, to form relationships with other species, to get creative and learn to jam together. What are the possibilities and what could it mean to weave ropes with sunbirds and songbirds, with swallows and starlings? What could it mean to feel our inter-wovenness together in Indra’s Net — to sense deeper into the entanglements of the living world?
Migrating birds trace invisible patterns and pathways across the Earth. The threads of their journeys form invisible networks, patterns of relatedness and entanglement. The Arctic Skua bird migrates to the global south to escape northern hemisphere winters. I’ve never seen an Arctic Skua that I know of, but I have heard that they sometimes nest on Table Mountain around December. Perhaps something in the invisible thread that connects us is activated now, because writing these words brings the Skua bird to my awareness and I become a little more curious and attuned. A subtle energy opens in my consciousness, and now perhaps there is a thread between us, thin and delicate. We become entangled.
What does this mean, to be entangled? In his book Attuned, Thomas Hübl relates the 1997 discovery of physicist Nicolas Gisin, who managed to separate two entangled photons, sending them in opposite directions along an optical fiber. ‘The world-shattering part: whichever action the proton took, its entangled twin simultaneously made the precise complimentary action — seven miles away… Its central revelation: whether entangled particles are separated by seven miles or the length of multiple galaxies, they are never truly separate.’
Once we feel the rope between us, to what extent can we pull on each other from across distances, just like those two light particles in Gisin’s experiment appear to?
The dance choreographer Wendy Jehlen brought a similar question to an adaptation of the Persian Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds, which I saw performed as a dance piece last year at a public arts festival in Cape Town. How can we be different together? was the question she posed.
In a talk she gave, she linked this question to a curiosity about quantum entanglement. As you pass by someone on the street, electrons from your bodies might be exchanged. Are you entangled? As each of us travels our life path, coming from our particular culture, experience and everything that we are, we leave our traces with those whom we meet, just as they leave their traces with us. It is through these patterns of relatedness, some more enduring or more seemingly perceptible and impactful than others, that we find meaning in our lives. Whether we are talking of the thickest of ropes or the thinnest of threads connecting us to others, we are entangled, and our entanglements appear infinite. This is reflected in the word ubuntu from African Bantu languages: I am because you are. We are interconnected.
In the Sufi poem, a flock of different birds has gathered together. They long to find a sovereign, a leader. The Hoopoe bird, with his regal crown, steps forward. He is the messenger bird, the one who will guide the flock to meet the Simorgh, the leader they seek. The journey will be long and arduous, with each of the birds expressing the fears and worries that hold them back. As the Hoopoe answers each one, elaborating on his answers through clever parables, a picture emerges of the purity of heart and the clarity of devotion that is necessary to flock and murmur together, to unite with others in a quest to meet the sublime, to give ourselves to that which is larger than us.
Wendy Jehlen described the process of adapting and choreographing the poem with a diverse group of multicultural dancers from around the world, each bringing their unique personal and cultural aspects and styles of movement:
‘The piece is made up of everyone’s ideas and stories. It is intentional and planned but also not planned. There is commitment to the collective in the room together. An important part of our process is the fact of entanglement. We have our different stories, desires and needs but once we are called together like the birds in the poem, our consciousness becomes one. The birds decide to go on this journey together. They go through all these difficulties and they become one flock, one bird.’
In the poem, the birds must endure together through an arduous journey that spans seven valleys, each presenting a new trial of purification and transformation. As enumerated in the glorious translation of the work by Iranian-American poet Sholeh Wolpé, there is
Valley of the Quest, where the Wayfarer begins by casting aside all dogma, belief, and unbelief.
Valley of Love, where reason is abandoned for the sake of love.
Valley of Knowledge, where worldly knowledge becomes utterly useless.
Valley of Detachment, where all desires and attachments to the world are given up. Here, what is assumed to be “reality” vanishes.
Valley of Unity, where the Wayfarer realises that everything is connected and that the Beloved is beyond everything, including harmony, multiplicity, and eternity.
Valley of Wonderment, where, entranced by the beauty of the Beloved, the Wayfarer becomes perplexed and, steeped in awe, finds that he or she never has never known or understood anything.
Valley of Poverty and Annihilation, where the self disappears into the universe and the Wayfarer becomes timeless, existing in both the past and the future.’
Some of the birds die of fright just to contemplate the task ahead. Others perish of hunger and thirst along the way. At last, there are just thirty birds who reach the place of the Simorgh. And when they finally arrive at their destination, what do they discover?
They see their own reflections mirrored in a lake. Si-morgh, the name of the mythical bird leader they have been seeking, also means “thirty birds.” Each individual bird sees its own reflection mirrored in the lake, yet the birds also see themselves united in the reflection of one bird, the Simorgh. Together, they are thirty birds and they are one bird; without relinquishing their individual selves, they have become the greater unified consciousness they were seeking.
That this epic of spiritual homecoming would be interpreted in a modern day context through the question — how can we be different together? — makes sense to me. As Jehlen explained, the piece responds to the modern-day violence of artificial borders and barriers. Rather than standardizing and conforming, and staying small in our separate little boxes, she asks, how do we come together in the full glory of our unique differences, listening to and learning from one another, giving and receiving as individuals and as collectives, so that the world trembles with the strength of our entanglements, and new patterns of connection and meaning can emerge into life?
Attar of Nishapur, the Persian Sufi poet who composed The Conference of the Birds, also lived in a time of great violence and strife. Genghis Khan’s armies were advancing across Asia, waging bloody wars to consolidate his empire. Though little fact is known about his life, Attar himself is understood to have died a violent death at the age of seventy, during the Mongol army’s invasion of Nishapur in 1221 CE, some thirty years after he wrote the poem.
Just as we cannot really know what it felt like to traverse the savannah as a hunter-gatherer sensing the ropes of connection to lions and tortoises, pied warblers and rain clouds, it is difficult to imagine living through the terror of invading armies in a distant era. We can imagine a taste of it, but we cannot really know. For artists, translators, storytellers and nature mentors alike, it seems often that the task of adapting ancient practices, texts and tales to modern sensibilities is not so much to try and bring back something that was, but rather to evoke some essential truth held within the form so that new living patterns of meaning can emerge from it.
Attar’s contemporary translator Sholeh Wolpé observes:
‘As a bilingual and bicultural poet, I believe that the freshness of a text is best communicated when the translator does not attempt to “translate” the untranslatable. A new image, new idea, new way of looking at something, even if it is a word, not only enriches the destination language, but also brings attention to the richness of other diverse cultures and thoughts. As Attar repeatedly points out, the destination is the same for all souls, but not all paths are of equal measure. Similarly, we do not, nor indeed can we, make the journey of the birds in the exact way the readers of the poem did centuries ago.
The joys and perils of today are different. Perhaps we need different ways of weaving our ropes to reflect this. How can we weave strong ropes with urgency to respond to a living world we can almost see unravelling before our very eyes? How could we weave ropes with the migratory birds, for example, who need protection of the refuges that provide them with food and rest on their long journeys? Could ropes that we form help keep them safe from the melting polar ice caps, ocean garbage patches, dried up lake beds and toxic pollution spills that imperil their lives?
And what might our ropes with birds do for us in turn? Unbounded and free, birds glide above walls and fences, making nests, lifting the hearts of the world with their songs, carrying twigs and berries and seeds to generate new life in other places both near and far. As Joshua Michael Schrei observes, there is something in our somatic architecture that responds to the soaring of birds in flight. It lifts our spirits and helps us see new horizons. In such times of strife, he asserts, we must raise our consciousness up to soar with the birds:
‘the issues facing the world demand that we free up the imaginiative consciousness. All of the upward trajectories that we learned from birds can help us ideate, imagine, envision what this world and our lives can be. How can we possibly see our way out of the mess that we’re in if we don’t gain perspective, if we don’t let ourselves soar?’
But also, how can we see our way out of this mess if we don’t let our hair down and play? Not too far from where I am sitting in the park, wondering what I could learn from the songs of birds, a small group of musicians sits on the grass. I hear a beautiful guitar melody, a rhythmic drumbeat, and human voices soaring as though in conversation with the birds. This musical melding of bird and human song lifts my heart.
These living patterns we all weave through our threads and strings and cords and ropes with each other create meaning for all of us to hold. And as I think to myself how lovely it would be to play music with birds, I find just the inspiration I am looking for — again on the Lifeworlds podcast. A conversation between host Alexa Firmenich and interspecies musician David Rothenberg, a prolific improvisor and author, covers an impressive range of interspecies entanglements formed through the joy of music: ‘it’s the beautiful patterns of sound that we like to hear, like to explore, kind of for their own sake,’ he says. As he talks about his jams with the famous Nightingales in Berlin, with cicadas and humpback whales, his enthusiasm is infectious. If you want to have a listen to the episode, you are in for a treat! Let me just leave you with this thought taken from it:
Jamming together, whether with humans and/or more-than-humans, can take you to new places, says David Rothenberg:
‘… which I think you want to aspire to when you play along with nightingales and humpback whales. You just learn how to join in with them and make a music that no one species could make alone. I don’t know if the humpback whales or nightingales care about this music, but together we’re making something that’s never happened before, or that neither of us could do without the other.’
So now, as you may imagine, I am thinking of bird language and birdsong. I imagine jamming, forming ropes and weaving new patterns of meaning with humans and more-than-humans alike. What about you? What new ropes would you form? Would you consider musical collaboration with the birds on your stoep, or the insects chirping in your garden? What ropes would you form with the migratory birds who come to rest in your backyard?
With love,
Megan