Liquid Runs of Melody

I was awakened early this morning by a cardinal and a titmouse singing in the walnut tree outside my window. And I could hear also, in a kind of counterpoint to those bright and piercing notes, the tap-tap-tap of dripping eaves. Is it possible? Are rumors of spring true?

Birdsong has probably inspired more poetry and music than any other event in nature. How we interpret those songs makes up a tiny but vigorous sub-genre of literature that can sometimes be as entertaining as the songs themselves. [Songs of the northern cardinal can be heard here] [Listen to a tufted titmouse here]

Thoreau’s journals are filled with examples. He writes that the wood thrush’s “cool bars of melody” make him think of  “…the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs.”

For John James Audubon, the same bird’s song recalls  “… the emotions of the lover, who at one moment exults in the hope of possessing the object of his affections, and the next pauses in suspense…” [To hear the song of  a wood thrush, go here]

The hermit thrush, says John Burroughs, “…suggests a serene religious beatitude as no other sound in nature… ‘O spheral, spheral!’… ‘O holy, holy! O clear away, clear away! O clear up, clear up!’ interspersed with the finest trills and the most delicate preludes. It … seems to be the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains in his best moments.”
Another thrush (what kind he doesn’t say) inspired Lewis Thomas to write: “The thrush in my backyard sings down his nose in meditative liquid runs of melody, over and over again, and I have the strongest impression that he does this for his own pleasure. Some of the time he seems to be practicing, like a virtuoso in his apartment. He starts a run, reaches a midpoint in the second bar where there should be a set of complex harmonics, stops, and goes back to begin over, dissatisfied… It is a meditative, questioning kind of music, and I cannot believe that he is simply saying, ‘thrush here.’” [Listen to a  hermit thrush here]

Here is John Muir on the song of the American dipper (he called it the Water Ouzel): “…his mellow, fluty voice is ever tuned to downright gladness…his music is that of the streams refined and spiritualized. The deep booming notes of the falls are in it, the trills of rapids, the gurgling of margin eddies, the low whispering of level reaches, and the sweet tinkle of separate drops oozing from the ends of mosses and falling into tranquil pools.”

And Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher on the same bird:“…a burst of rippling notes… a clear, sweet song… In vivid moonlight we could see them… dipping and bobbing on rocks in the cold shining water – and singing. Their song echoed back and forth so that all the lake was ringing with it.  When we went inside again the birds flew above our roof and poured their music down on us… those crystal tinkles, which matched so perfectly the icy purity of the winter night.” [For the song of the American dipper, go here]

Roger Tory Peterson on the song of another Western species, the canyon wren: “A gushing cadence of clear, curved notes tripping down a scale…”

[Songs of the canyon wren can be heard here]

Donald Culross Peattie on the song of the white-throated sparrow:  “…the white-throat’s touching chromatic pierces the heart; it blends sadness and happiness… a song like a cry, a song that speaks of the antiquity of time, the briefness of life.”

[To hear the "Old Sam Peabody, Peabody" call of the white-throated sparrow, go here]

Izaac Walton, on the nightingale: “…which breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight…should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth and say, ‘Lord, what music hast Thou provided for the saints in heaven, when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth.’”

D.H. Lawrence, also on the nightingale: “A kind of brilliant calling and interweaving of glittering exclamation such as must have been heard on the first day of creation, when the angels suddenly found themselves created, and shouting aloud before they knew it. Then there must have been a to-do of angels in the thickets of heaven: ‘Hello! Hello! Behold! Behold! Behold! It is I! It is I! What a mar-mar-marvelous occurrence! What!”

And, finally, Thoreau again, on the winter wren: “It was surprising for its steady and uninterrupted flow… It reminded me of a fine corkscrew stream issuing with incessant lisping tinkle from a cork, flowing rapidly.” [The winter wren's song is here]