New Research Uncovers An Orchestra Of Bird Music

Three recent articles on bird music research have deepened my already profound appreciation for our sonorous avian companions:

1) Teresa Feo and Christopher Clark of Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology just published their study of unusual adaptation in the Anna's hummingbird that allows males to sound a 4 kHz chirp (four octaves above Middle C) by vibrating their tail feathers in flight. Normally birds of this size are too small to generate any significant amount of noise -  but by spreading out their specially-tapered outer tail feathers during a 100-foot dive, these hummingbirds turn themselves into living reed whistles.  (Overwhelming evidence that tail-shaking is sexy, no matter the species.)

The delicious literary twist on this story is that Feo is a clarinetist in the UC Berkeley marching band - so it comes as no surprise that she noticed the reed-like musical courtship of the Anna's hummingbirds in San Francisco's shoreline parks.  It won't be long before this discovery is standard to biomechanics textbooks, adding Feo to the slim ranks of biologist-clarinetist-rockstars...score another point for being an artist and a scientist!

(More on this here:  Discovery Channel  ...and here:  UC Berkeley)

2) The so-called "duck-billed" dinosaurs (or hadrosaurs), an extensive group of four-legged, herding herbivores, are famous for the bizarre ornaments each species carried atop its skull.  These crests evolved from the nasal bones, and many of them were actually hollowed out by sinus cavities - a strange feature that has perplexed paleontologists for decades.


Now, a theory first proposed by Carl Wilman in 1931 is gaining credence - the recent discovery of Velafrons coahuilensis ("sailed forehead from Coahuila") in Mexico by paleontologists at the Utah Museum of Natural History supports the hypothesis that duck-billed dinosaurs used their head flair to amplify species-specific "trumpeting."  From the neck down, each type of hadrosaur looks nearly identical - but their wild variety of crests would each have produced a different sonic signature. 


A study of hadrosaur ears by James Hopson indicates that they were at least as well-developed as those of modern crocodilians, many of which use auditory signals for mating.  And several scientists at Sandia Laboratory have reconstructed hadrosaur nasal passages in a computer and actually made music with them .


(David Weishampel famously constructed a six-foot twist of PVC piping, the approximate length and curvature of a Parasaurolophus crest, that he blared for dinosaur documentaries back in the 1990s - let me know if you can find a video of this online!).  The funky armature of Velafrons is one more compelling piece of evidence to suggest that Earth in the Late Cretaceous Period was a pretty noisy place - covered, as it was, with roaming herds of thousands of five-ton trombones.

And yes, using the principles of Lazy Taxonomy, birds count as dinosaurs, so dinosaurs count as birds.

(More on this here:  NY Times  ...and here:  Discovery Channel)

3) I almost want to devote an entire essay to this one:  Scientists at Cardiff University have found that male songbirds exposed to environmental pollutants sing longer, more complex tunes that are favored by female songbirds!  Specifically, European starlings (Sternus vulgaris) that grow up eating insects full of synthetic estrogen (!) and estrogen mimics sing longer, more frequent, and more intricate tunes. 


Researcher Katherine Buchanan and her colleagues cracked open a few starling heads and found that the high vocal center (HVC) of these birds' brains is significantly enlarged by these chemicals...which also disrupt endocrine function and paradoxically weaken the starlings' reproductive efficiency.

...And here is where I wax poetically about the double-bind of maleness, the intimate relationship between creation and destruction, the aesthetic bonus we inherit for growing up on a polluted planet, speculation about how my own musicality correlates with toxic produce and breakfast cereals, and the crucifixion.  Back in my college town of Lawrence, Kansas, the sunsets are gorgeous - heartbreaking reds and pinks and oranges.  The vibrancy is due to atmospheric pollutants that scatter sunlight, filtering out higher frequencies and leaving spectators with the low, slow throb of the longer wavelengths.  It's only so beautiful because, for hundreds of miles west of Lawrence, the skies are choked with agricultural dust and smokestack exhaust.  Here in Boulder, Colorado, flanked to the west by the Continental Divide, the clean air doesn't offer such a spectacle.  For those of us who see beauty in intensity, it doesn't get much more inspiring than this:  living at the end of the world.  Just thinking about it makes me want to sing.  Maybe my HVC is swollen.

(More on this here:  Science Daily  ...and here:  PLoS)

Afterword:  After a careful consideration of these stories, I noticed that they correspond to three of the four different instrument groups (as I learned them in grade school:  woodwind, brass, and string instruments, respectively).  But, of course, birds have been at music for hundreds of millions of years longer than we have and have all their bases covered.  So I'd like to include Exhibit Four, allowing us to make a full bird-orchestra in our imaginations, complete with percussion:

4) Woodpeckers.