What's up with bird languages?
Birds obviously lead rich and communicative lives, sometimes to the detriment of our sleep. Neighbourhood crows, I'm looking at you. But what do they say? Do birds use grammar? Can humans learn bird?
Disclaimers, disclaimers.
Okay, I want to start by saying that if you’re a birder of any sort, this post will probably offend your sensibilities to the point of actual audible groaning because it’s so painful (for you) to witness such a ham-fisted distillation of basic bird concepts by someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
The most experience I’ve had in the world of ornithology is the following:
I once had to google and catalogue the characteristics of British birds in a spreadsheet for a gig that I didn’t even get.
One of the biggest inspirations for this project is Alie Ward’s podcast, Ologies, which has episodes on more than a few bird-related topics (birds generally, crow funerals, feathers, pelicans, and penguins, among others).
The crow that likes to sit on the power line outside my living room window and stare in for hours at a time.
All the iterations of the Toronto Blue Jays logo (the Baltimore Orioles and St. Louis Cardinals can come too, I guess).
My dad’s affinity for bird feeders that has led to my folks’ Lake Ontario-adjacent yard being a hotspot for dozens of different species. I don’t know, apparently orioles like grape jelly.
Bird…is the word. (Sorry, you’re welcome)
What I really love about digging around in the world of birds is how strong the connection is between Indigenous knowledge and understanding the role of birds in their ecosystems. As a settler myself, living and working on the unceded territory of Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh nations, it’s important to my continuing decolonization project to exercise the ability to widen the lens of my own work and acknowledge how much of this information originates in ongoing Indigenous-land relationships rather than from settler-academic study.
When one removes themselves from the colonial ideas of expertise and education, of commodifying and co-opting the study of nature, there remains a need to embody “cultural humility” in exploring ecological relationships. In the words of Pınar and So Pinopoulos-Lloyd, founders of the decolonial outdoor education project Queer Nature, “cultural humility in regard to First Nations peoples is an integral part and natural extension of the ‘situational awareness’ that is so upheld in teaching many different nature-based skills.”
They go on:
“Many of the skills and crafts [Queer Nature] teach have cultural roots all over the world, but nonetheless the fact that land-based peoples were so recently and massively displaced on this continent and are a common touchstone and inspiration for many Westerners in regard to survival skills and bushcraft means that there is an obvious psychological and cultural connection that often gets ignored.”
In the hopes of decolonizing my understandings of naturalist concepts, it’s my intention to de-centre settler perspectives on birds and work to carry forward the legacy and active momentum of Indigenous knowledge on the subject.
So let’s talk about what the purpose of verbal/aural communication between birds can be and how humans are deciphering the different calls. What are they saying to each other anyway?
Generally, there are a few basic types of communication (“calls”) that birds rely on to manage their bird business, with each species having unique identifying characteristics. That being said, just like humans who might not speak the same language as someone nearby, it’s pretty clear what the vibes of a conversation are if you catch the social context around them. The meanings are universal but the delivery might change.
Birds are these strange and beautiful dinosaurs that basically get up on stage at an open mic to try to woo their crush through the power of song, call their kids and mates home for dinner, and can send out a warning in response to someone in the neighbourhood behaving like a threat, among other things. There are a handful of primary calls that cover what they’re trying to say.
Contact Calls
Frick, these are cool because you can fairly easily pinpoint matching pairs of calls for a bunch of different species if you’re in a good spot. Contact calls are the soft and rhythmic call-and-response sounds you’ve probably heard before. Individuals in the flock use these shorter calls to check in with their mate and other friendly members of their local group and receive calls back from them.
Typically contact calls are only relevant to birds of the same species and serve to help mates and families geolocate each other, but the most information coming out of contact calls comes from the other cues of the birds doing the calling. If you can get a look at one more of the individuals, their behaviour can tell you even more about what they’re meaning to communicate.
Cardinals, for example, make these gentle chipping (as opposed to…chirping…stay with me) contact calls when they’re foraging on the ground. These sound more dull and percussive to blend in with other things going on in the area. Innocuous-sounding calls keep pairs or families in touch with each other and don’t signal their presence to predators as clearly as more distinctive ones.
If cardinals have a nest with juveniles and are doing their thing higher up, their contact calls typically shift toward more of a high-pitched dynamic chirp. Similar to a parent who needs a little extra support right now from their partner when the kiddos are hangry, contact calls can be inflected with urgency, demand, anger, or whatever’s happening in their relaysh at the time. (Tony, get here with those worms already! The kids are crawling up the walls!)
Song
The most musical of the all! Meant to be fun and flirty, songs get an extensive melodic treatment to attract a mate. Think froofy trills and whistle tones to induce the cutie in the next tree to come by. And the more range an individual possesses and the faster their ability to trill and enunciate, the better condition they appear to be in. Potential mates tend to find these dynamic callers more desirable. (Who wouldn’t?)
Different species have also adapted their songs to the surrounding environment, as one would expect. Species who make their home in dense forest tend to sing with more loud and sharp inflections, and in the case of owls, low, deep and sustained to cut through the foliage. Cardinals, too, with their grassy and more sparsely treed home turf have that chip chip thing going to blend in with the foliage that doesn’t absorb sound quite as much.
If a bird is breaking into song it almost always means they’re free from imminent danger and ready to perform. Individuals who tend to sing more tend to be less successful in the dating world. Eligible mates tend to snap up those well-ranged and highly trilled bachelors fairly quickly.
Some species (crows and ravens, for example) learn specific songs from other dominant individuals over their lifetime, and can imitate those songs to gain clout with others, establish territory, and potentially gain an upper hand (wing?) in the courting process.
Calls of Aggression
Fighting for dominance in the bird community has its own call as well. Loud and urgent, they’re often accompanied by combat or physical intimidation against other individuals as they each try to maintain territorial control or fight off advances against potential mates.
Self-explanatory, right? Stay away from us, we’re in love!!!!!
Juvenile begging calls can also fall into the aggression call category. The younger and more inexperienced birds tend to be raucous as they figure out how to manage their emotions, which can lead to danger from predators who pick up their demands to be fed. (Tony!) Those who learn to control themselves tend to survive longer than those who don’t.
Alarm Calls
According to what I’ve read, often there are few sound markers that differentiate between aggression calls and alarm calls. They both occur at emotional highs and cast a big neon sign over the area that says SOMETHING IS GOING ON. The biggest difference between the two is context.
Think of that moment when trouble shows up to the club. Alarm bells go off in the group chat, you’re rounding up your pals and preparing to make an exit ASAP. The idea behind alarm calls is to let the group know to flee without having to go into detail. There’s no time.
Danger. Now. Let’s go.
Inflection and context make the biggest difference. And it’s not just one species that can decipher the alarm call. Since birds and truly the entire wild world live in a state of survival mode, seeing and hearing a chickadee sound the alarm will send crows, mice, rabbits and just about every creature liable to be something’s prey into a defensive manoeuvre. Expressions of surprise and fear don’t go unnoticed by passersby in most contexts.
It’s like how we read body language. The cues are impossible to ignore. For birds, fighting for clout and territory looks like business as usual with a couple of clowns figuring out what their deal is; sounding an alarm springs the whole place into action.
Go on, scram(mar)!
Heh.
Since humans haven’t actually cracked the code for how to verbally communicate with birds, but rather we’ve been able to interpret calls based on their context, it’s not very likely that we’ll break through to a Rosetta Stone-level translation situation. That being said, the general consensus is that birds don’t communicate using discrete words or a grammatical structure. The next nearest concept that I’ve been able to find to bird grammar is just what we’ve discussed to this point: it’s all relational.
At the heart of it, birds have a language but there aren’t distinct languages used by different species. They’re more like dialects. The tones, melodies, registers, and rhythms used by individuals may be different but they all end up communicating the same basic ideas:
Contact. Attract. Power. Danger.
Seems like a code humans can continue to crack, no?
Is it possible to speak bird?
Like, potentially, but probably only a few specific species’ calls without help.
The more time a person spends in the presence of these dialects the more likely they are to start picking up on the cues and what they mean. In hunting and trapping practice, listening to the birds is a method long known to signal danger of all sorts well before human senses can detect it. So on the listening and understanding front, definitely. In terms of being able to respond? Likely not.
The unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on how close you live to your neighbours) part of learning and expressing bird calls is that human anatomy doesn’t have the same ability to express complex sounds as birds can. As humans we have a larynx with a folded membrane that vibrates when air is pushed through by the lungs. Avian physiology includes twin membranes in the larynx which allow birds to produce two pitches at a time. Stretching and contracting muscles in the neck and back, coupled with a beak for maximizing acoustics and two rows of powerful vocal folds can create all kinds of wild vocalizations like taps, squeaks, and bonks. Perfect for open mic night. You’re out of luck if you want to deliver the full gamut but, bright side, there’s probably an app for that.
Thanks for reading, peep peeps! You can listen to examples of bird calls at Bird Language, and the Arizona Field Ornithologists Sound Library.
Your friend, Nat