2 
Bird-Song : and New Zealand Song Birds 
reluctant admission seems to be made that birds may occa- 
•.„„ llv an d as it were accidentally, stumble on the same scale 
ft, professional musician uses, 
But a little reflection must compel something more than a 
reluctant admission. Fowler, himself a musician, maintains 
(FY pp. 257, 258), that birds do not dwell definitely on 
any’note, but modify it by slightly raising or lowering 
the pitch,’ and sliding insensibly into another note, for¬ 
saking that for a subdued chuckle or trill, descending 
or ascending through fractions of a tone. Surely the 
most casual listener knows that birds do dwell on single 
notes, and repeat single notes of different pitch clearly and 
in succession. And in human singing, is it not the finished 
singer who, besides singing single notes of even pitch clear and 
true, also blends notes in slurs and trills, until we say she sings 
“like a bird’’—implying a decided compliment? When a 
singer is out of tune, there is a failure to pay due regard to 
exact intervals: how often is a bird heard singing out of tune, 
despite its raising and lowering of pitch, its chuckles and its 
trills, and its sliding insensibly from one note into another? 
Moreover, standards of taste in human song differ: to most 
European ears the song of the Maori is monotonous and un¬ 
musical in the extreme. Yet the Maori thoroughly appreciates 
his own music, and appreciates in addition the music of the 
European, singing it, as well as his own, with facility, fidelity, 
and undoubted art. Birds, too, are able to learn human tunes; 
and the powers of natural mocking-birds are too well known 
to need remark. Do not such powers prove the receptivity of 
birds to be akin to that of man, and their discrimination to be 
as keen as liis—for do not human beings, too, first learn by 
imitation ? 
In Maori music, it is not the apparently small compass of the 
song that makes it distasteful to many ears, but the free use 
of quarter-tones (GO, pp. 225 et seq .), and even lesser divisions 
than quarter tones. Then why is not the song of birds wit 
small compass distasteful? Again, if failure to adheie to t ie 
recognized pitch of notes and recognized intervals cause 
