Note: This program first aired May 9, 2015.
Spring, such a sweet word here on the 44th
parallel. All winter long we ache for it, and then suddenly it’s here, and it
is a revelation each and every year. And the revelations are for all of the
senses. Visually things reappear as the snow pack melts, dog toys, garden
tools, the tiny green shoots of the chives and the daffodils. When the air
warms and moistens, smells return-rotting leaves, broken balsam branches, open
water. Your skin knows it is spring by the warmth of the sun on your face, the
softness of the humid air on your body, and the rare and joyful days when you
can walk outside without a jacket. For me though, the sense that is most
enlivened by the start of spring is the auditory one; as much as I love the
warm air and sunlight, the increasingly complicated soundtrack of spring is the
sign I love best.
Winter is a season of silence, punctuated by gusty wind, the
breaking of snow laden branches and the twittering of the same familiar avian
cast at the bird feeder: chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, gold finches, purple
finches, redpolls, tit mice, blue jays, and downy and hairy woodpeckers. During
the right kind of storm, if you are patient, you can hear the snowflakes
hitting the ground. Go for a walk on a bright cold morning and the snow creaks
under your boot steps. Sparse is winter’s soundscape.
Spring by contrast is an every growing cacophony. This
winter was cold enough that our precipitation was all snow, and the sound of
the spring’s first rainstorm on my metal roof was a delightful surprise. More
so than weather, the sounds of animals coming back to life are what most of us
think of as the sound track to spring. Chickadees may have been singing since
January or February, but the woodcock is the first bird I hear that tells me
that winter’s back has indeed been broken. Next comes the phoebes, and the wood
frogs, then hermit thrushes, then the peepers. I heard a familiar whistle and
looked up to see a broad winged hawk pass overhead. Soon sunrise will bring
with it the restless tuning of a symphony of little warblers. Our current cold
gray weather has slowed the progression of spring migration, but when the sun
comes back out and the air starts warming in earnest, each day will bring a new
voice to the outdoor audio mix.
As this happens, I would encourage you not to worry about
identifying the bird you are hearing, at least, not at first. Just let your
brain do what it does best, let it tune into the sounds around you out side.
Like an old fashioned radio, you just need to spin the dial to the background
bird frequency and your brain will do the rest. Suddenly without realizing you
heard anything, an awareness will bubble up into your consciousness that you
just heard something you don’t recognize, or do recognize but haven’t heard yet
this season. Many a spring morning I have been draw into consciousness, pushed
out of that light early morning sleep by that just below the conscious part of
my brain, as it got excited by hearing a new bird song, and had to wake me up
to share the excitement. We are evolved to do this, to pay close attention to
the goings on in the world around us. All of our senses, dulled as they are by
modern life, have hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated evolutionary honing for just this purpose. A
couple hundred years of being industrialized doesn’t make that go away.
There’s good genetic evidence for this too, scientists have
shown that humans and birds use the same genes to fire up the same parts of their
respective brains used in communication. I don’t know if birds’ brains are
stimulated when I talk to them as I walk through the woods, but I am sure that
my human brain responds to bird song, even when I am not consciously listening
to birds, and it is a remarkable experience. So this spring let yourself just
hear the birds, let your brain recognize and sort out the different songs, get
familiar with the patterns and then you will notice when they change. This is
the brain’s true work.
References:
Genetic evidence for birds and humans sharing communication
genes: https://today.duke.edu/2014/12/vocalbird
Ok, but I still want to know WHAT birds I am hearing: http://birdcast.info/forecast/24-april-1-may-2015-forecast-and-thats-a-cold-shot-baby/#MidwestNortheast
If nothing else, listening to the birds will make you feel
better: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494413000650
