The Meaning of Bird Music 



By HENRY OLDYS 



WHEN, on some dark, over- 

 cast night in late Septem- 

 ber, there come to the ear 

 from overhead sundry piping or chirp- 

 ing notes, it is easy to recognize them 

 as auditory signals holding together 

 certain flocks of migrating birds on 

 their annual journey to the South. But 

 when one of these migrants, while re- 

 turning to its summer home, perches 

 on a twig and, with head thrown back 

 and throat vibrating, pours out a series 

 of orderly tones, the significance of the 

 utterance is not so apparent. 



It is now the well-settled opinion 

 that such utterances do not find their 

 primary stimulus in courtship and mat- 

 ing. Darwin's theory that the choice of 

 mate on the part of the female is an 

 important factor in development of 

 song in the male has been sufficiently 

 discredited by Herbert Spencer, St. 

 George Mivart, August Weismann, and 

 others, and is now discarded by virtu- 

 ally all the leading students of evolu- 

 tion. It is, of course, undeniable that 

 songs, like plumage displays, are used 

 in connection with courtship; but such 

 use is merely an incidental one, as it is 

 with human beings, and is probably 

 seldom, if ever, the determining factor 

 in the female's choice of a mate. More- 

 over, even on Darwin's assumption that 

 the finest singers mate most easily and 

 so transmit their superior qualities by 

 inheritance more frequently than sing- 

 ers of a lower grade, thus gradually 

 improving the race musically, it is 

 doubtful if such progenial transmission 

 of musical qualities would prove to be 

 the chief means of progress, in view of 

 the important part played by acquisi- 

 tion of song bv imitation in musical 



improvement among birds. It is well 

 known that the singing powers of 

 canaries are not produced by breeding 

 from gifted ancestors, but by associat- 

 ing the birds with unrelated superior 

 singers known as "campaninis," which 

 are kept for this special purpose and 

 which often command very high prices. 

 Wild birds similarly improve their sing- 

 ing by imitation of better singers of 

 their own species, as is evidenced by 

 several direct examples of such imita- 

 tion which have come to my personal 

 attention. Furthermore, few female 

 birds sing; and it seems most prob- 

 able that if they possessed sufficiently 

 discriminative ears to appreciate and 

 select the finest singers among the 

 males, they would themselves become 

 singers. 



But if Darwin's theory of sexual se- 

 lection be inadequate to account for 

 the development of bird song from the 

 original unmusical ejaculations to the 

 present melodies, what is the true cause 

 of such development? The simple and 

 natural answer is that musical evolu- 

 tion among birds is due to the same 

 causes that have produced musical 

 evolution in man, especially as the re- 

 sults of the two streams of evolution 

 show marked resemblances. 



It is customary, at the present time, 

 to deprecate any interpretation of ani- 

 mal behavior in terms of human beha- 

 vior — to attempt to explain all actions of 

 the lower animals on the basis of differ- 

 ent psychical processes from those pro- 

 ducing similar actions on the part of 

 the human species. This attitude ex- 

 presses the natural reaction against the 

 popular tendency to overhumanize the 

 lower animals. Unscientific minds as- 



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