Almost everyone loves hearing birds sing! Even if you rarely pay attention to the birds singing around you, you’d miss them if they stopped and might even feel more depressed. So start listening for the birds in your area, and listen here to learn some of the wonders of how and why they sing.
Listen on YouTube:
A few resources:
5 fascinating facts about birdsong
Which birds are the best mimics?
Listening to birds sing really does soothe your brain. Here’s why.
American robin sound effect from Pixabay
Crow sound clip from BBC Sound Effects, recordists: Nigel Tucker and David Tombs, 22 April 1988
Brown thrasher sound clip from Wikipedia (Creative Commons license)
Blackbird sound clip from BBC Sound Effects, recordist: Eric Simms, 1 May 1961
Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0
Cover image of American robin from Pixabay (artist: Veronika Andrews)
Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!):
Welcome to 9 Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.
I don’t know what kind of bird that was, but I recorded that little clip on São Miguel Island, the largest of the Azores islands, where I was a couple weeks ago. And when I was there, I was thinking about how magical bird songs are. And I thought, “Well, I’ll talk about that with all of you!”
Do you notice songbirds where you live? Do you recognize their songs? And can you identify what kind of bird it is? It doesn’t matter if you can’t, because even if you don’t have a clue who’s singing, you probably like what you hear much of the time. And as I’ll talk about in a few minutes, hearing birds sing is good for us and can definitely inspire wonder, as you’ve probably already discovered if you’ve paid any attention to them.
So before I talk about that, what do I mean by songbirds anyway? Of course, birds who sing, right? And they’re birds who you might see singing in the trees or maybe on the ground. But we’re not talking about geese and ducks and those other large birds who will call to each other as they fly, but they don’t do what we generally consider to be singing, right?
However, a crow, did you know, is also technically a songbird. And as you probably know, crows typically sound like this.
[crow sound clip]
I love crows, but it’s not the most beautiful song, right? So you don’t have to sing beautifully to be considered a songbird. There are actually some scientific criteria, and if you want more information about that, I’ll leave an article in the notes where you can learn more. From now on in this episode, I’ll often just say “bird,” but you know I’m talking about songbirds.
By the way, you might have heard about birds singing and birds making calls, and songs and calls are not the same. This is a clip of an American robin making a call.
[American robin call sound clip]
Calls like this signal danger or can keep the birds in touch with each other when they’re flying.
But as you know, if you live in North America, and actually as you might also know from the European version or maybe other parts of the world, the robin’s song is much nicer on the ear. And at least in North America is a classic sound of spring and early summer. Here’s the American robin’s song.
[American robin song sound clip]
Bird songs are more melodic and complicated than calls, and the boys sing way more than the girls, especially in areas like Europe and North America outside of the tropics. And they sing to identify their territories and attract the girls to them. And then the girls hear them and say, “Hell yeah, I’m going for him,” or not.
And in general, healthier, more robust birds within a species tend to have better songs. They sing longer and they have a larger repertoire, and this probably affects how females choose their mates.
And they’ve also found that more complex songs that birds sing can pose a greater territorial threat to other birds in the same species, basically saying, “I sing a very complex song, and so you need to steer clear of me. This is my space.”
Of course, there are various theories about why birds sing, and we obviously can’t ask the birds, so we have to do our best, and ornithologists and other scientists have to do their best to just listen to the bird songs, record them, and come up with their own ideas. And we can come up with our own ideas and theories about why birds sing.
“Why” is just one question, because when you think about it, right, like how do they learn to sing? I think that is actually a more awe-inspiring question. And researchers have studied this question too, of course.
Songbirds learn how to sing very early in their lives, much as we learn to speak very early in our lives. And if we don’t for some reason, we’re in trouble. And if we don’t learn how to speak another language, like say if we grew up speaking English and then we did not learn how to speak Spanish when we were little kids, it’ll take us longer to learn Spanish and we’ll always have an accent.
An early experiment on songbirds from the 1950s showed that birds raised in captivity without hearing any other birds singing learned to sing abnormally, and their songs didn’t sound quite right. But if the birds were played a recording of adult birds of their own species singing, the baby birds did learn how to sing normally. So they learn from listening to adult birds of their own species when they’re very young.
Baby birds have an innate ability to recognize the songs of their own species as opposed to other species. So you might say, “Well, there’s a forest and there’s like 25 kinds of birds. How do the babies know who they should be paying attention to?” It’s just innate, apparently. And the baby birds get more excited when they hear adult birds of their own kind, even if there are many types of birds around.
When they’re first learning to sing, baby birds start babbling, just like human babies do, like “blah, blah, blah.” It’s not a real song, but it’s just the beginning of vocalizing. And over time, their songs become more clearly aligned with the songs that their parents sing and that other birds of their species sing, until eventually they can sing those same songs.
Another cool thing is that songbirds can sing in different dialects depending on the neighborhood where they live, the locale where they live. And, you know, similar to how people speak with different accents or different dialects, depending on where they grew up.
You’ve also probably heard about birds who mimic other birds. Some examples are the song sparrow, the European starling, the mockingbird, and the brown thrasher.
The brown thrashers — their songs are just really great, and they can sing well over a thousand songs, and many of those songs are the songs of other species. So listen to this brown thrasher for a minute.
[brown thrasher sound clip]
I just love how he will sing two things that sound pretty similar or the same, and then he changes it up. And if I had more time, I would play you that whole recording. It was like five minutes of him doing that.
Okay, so I’ve given you some of today’s fun facts about songbirds, but let’s get back to how wonder-inspiring and how awe-inspiring they are. And think again about when you notice birds singing around you. How does it make you feel? And if you’re someplace where there are no birds, how does that make you feel?
And of course, social scientists like psychologists have studied how people react to bird song. And it’s probably not surprising that people really like to hear birds sing in general. In one study, when people reported seeing or hearing birds, they said that they felt better, and their enhanced mental health lasted for many hours. In another study, people reported feeling less depressed and anxious after listening to birds singing, and they reported even more positive feelings when they heard a greater variety of birds. And in the same study, another group of people listened to traffic noises, which made them feel more depressed.
It may be that bird songs signal safety and make us feel safe, like all is well in the forest. And really, if you think about it, if you’re walking in a forest and you don’t hear any birds, that is kind of creepy, right? And it actually could be a sign of danger because the birds stop singing when they want to hide. Sometimes they call loudly to alert other birds to danger, but sometimes they’re just silent. So we humans may have evolved to respond positively to singing birds for this reason. Isn’t that cool?
And of course, being in nature, especially in a place where there are a lot of birds singing, is simply delightful and can spark joy in us. I think most of us would agree with that.
So I encourage you to listen for the birds the next time you go outside. I know that if you live in the city it may be harder to hear them, or you might not have birds immediately outside your door, but there’ve got to be some around somewhere, and take a little walk and listen for them. And of course, look for them too, they’re fun to watch.
I’m going to end with this song from the common blackbird. I moved to Europe about seven years ago and have gotten to really look forward to hearing them sing, usually right outside my window in the springtime. As you’ll hear, their songs are very melodic. So enjoy the blackbird, and enjoy listening to your own local birds.
[blackbird sound clip]