Birdsong: A Natural History

Don Stap (hardcover, 259 pages, Scribner, 2005; $24)

From the cool, dry air and austere white walls of the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds on the first page of Birdsong, through cattailed marshlands of the author’s native Michigan, and into the vanishing rainforests of Costa Rica, Don Stap draws his readers into one of the greatest mysteries of the natural world: Why do birds sing? Why do some birds sing, while others only call? Why do some have a repertoire of fifty songs, while others know only one? And, most tantalizing of all, why do birds of the order oscine learn their songs, while the calls of their close relatives, the suboscines, are genetically encoded? Or are they?

In search of answers to these questions, Stap brings an impressive array of ornithologists to the page, most prominently fellow Dutch Michigan native Don Kroodsma, whose presence is the book’s unifying thread. Kroodsma’s awe of the mysteries of birdsong, his penetrating mind, and his relentless, rigorous, yet paradoxically relaxed and down-to-earth pursuit of answers draw the reader into a place unto itself. I found myself immediately in thrall to the same sort of suspense that once held me spellbound in the worlds of Watson and Crick in The Double Helix and Van Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur in The Microbe Hunters.

The scientific detective stories of my youth differ from Birdsong in that they were books in which scientists brought personal experience to the accounts of their science, while Stap is a poet (his first book is a slim volume of poetry, Letter at the End of Winter, published in 1987) who writes the world of science. His expanded definition of science is itself a testament to this:

Although science is a process—curiosity that flows toward reason, ideas shaped by observation and experiment—it is also the slow accretion of knowledge. One study builds on another like grains of sand collecting at a bend in a river. Each grain of sand is an act of seeing.

It is the finely tuned ear of a poet that judiciously selects unexpectedly lyrical quotes from Kroodsma’s forthcoming book, The Singing Life of Birds. It is a poet who treats us time and again to musical lists of bird names and offers such metaphoric descriptions as the one of a bellbird “fling[ing] its wattles about like a fifteen-year-old flipping her hair,” of a thrush’s song “as quick and sharp as flashes of light from a jewel in the sun” and of the narrow band of Central America as a “slender piece of geographic cartilage.” And it is the poet who tosses gems from Keats, Shelley, Thoreau and the poet W. S. Merwin into his portrayals of birds and bird life.

Stap’s beginnings as a poet are evident in his attention to place, in the care he takes to ground the reader within new landscapes. There is a fine attunement to the nuances of light in his poetry, and that awareness shows up repeatedly in his evocation of place in Birdsong. Describing Sierra Valley in Nevada, he writes

Mist was . . . rising from the waters of the marsh spreading out before us . . . . The valley, a flat-bottomed bowl rimmed with low mountains, was a mix of two shades of green, the light green of sage, and the darker greens of sedges and marsh grasses. A few strung-out clouds hung in the east just above the horizon where the sun was rising. The early-morning light, a soft amber, spilled onto the mountains to the west, lighting up the dark green spires of pines.

Calling attention to Stap’s prose poetry should not, however, detract from the scientific content of the book. It is truly a natural history of avian bioacoustics viewed through the portrait of Kroodsma, a leader in the field. Stap shows the cutting-edge researcher, a repeat recipient of National Science Foundation grants, decked out like a human porcupine in expensive recording equipment, bicycling around Martha’s Vineyard and hiking the mountains of Nicaragua. We observe Kroodsma’s commitment to precision in a natural setting that is anything but precise and witness the eccentricities of a man who takes genuine pleasure in repairing equipment worth thousands of dollars with a length of garden hose. We are also privy to the professional controversies Kroodsma has stirred by refusing to compromise for political expediency. He says, “ . . . the work is important, . . . and it’s not about the people doing it; it’s about the animals.”

The thread that is Kroodsma and his work is interspersed with chapterlength essays on the history of the study of birdsong, the development of the science of bioacoustics, the relationship between birdsong and music composed by humans, and on avian evolution. Stap’s clean, lucid prose brings such complexities as the physics of sound and sound recording and the anatomy and neurobiology of birdsong to within easy reach of the uninitiated. He glides agilely from a technical description of the analysis of how the two halves of a bird’s syrinx (vocal organ) produce separate sounds, to his metaphoric conclusion about the study: “It was astonishing—a bird singing a duet with itself. It seemed like something from a fable, no less fantastic than a bird rising from its own ashes.”

Loss of place and its tragic sequelae are an underlying theme throughout the book. Kroodsma’s urgency to study the bellbirds in Costa Rica and Nicaragua is partly due to the fact that the species is rapidly vanishing along with its rainforest home. Although Stap doesn’t directly say so, it seems that part of his purpose is to make readers aware of the threat to our avian neighbors and the special places they inhabit.

The similarities between fiction and nonfiction are debated frequently. It is more rare to hear a discussion on the thin line between poetry and nonfiction, but Birdsong, for all it’s scientific content, traverses that line.

Reviewed by Anna Redsand

Anna Redsand is a regular contributor to recommended books and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.