Birds, Our Feathery Musicians!

With spring and Pohela Boishakh festivities the most active participants were the humans. But the unnoticed participants, our feathery musicians go on singing in celebration without heed to the political chaos riddling the country! Their solo or chorus songs do not need entrance fees, just lend them an ear and the delightful music is there, no musical instruments needed either! I have once heard our noted musician Mita Huq say, “ Music is the balancing of the melody, synchronizing of the musical notes to reach out to the soul.” And birds, the nature's gifts to music seem to do just that! They sing thousands of tunes! High or low pitched, the melodies are pleasant to the ears! If we could decipher the notes sung by birds that might open a second heaven to the music lovers! Rabindranath Tagore might have been listening to the birds' songs when he wrote,
“tumi kemon kore gan koro he guni….ami obak hoye shuni....kebol shuni…..”.
Birds are known to sing to communicate, in territorial defense or attract a mate. Many song birds are known to sing in attractive tunes to reach out to a female bird. You can hear birds singing in chorus at dawn because that time is usually quieter and sound transmission is easier. The male song birds may be trying different notes to attract the female at dawn with throbbing hearts! The European wrens are known to have 700 notes per minute and can be heard from 500m away. I feel like the chosen when a magpie comes to sing on my window sill every day. How foolish of me! He sings to serenade the other magpies that swarm the trees around my house!

Photo: Ridwan Adid Rupon

If you listen carefully to the birds you may identify the notes: C-sharp , G-major or a grand orchestra! You may find more solace in birds' songs than Bach or Chopins' music. Nature has this magic of reaching out to the soul. I often wonder if birds in Bangladesh sing in Bangla? Are they singing away rag bhoirobi or kaharba so effortlessly when after days of practice the human voice fails to settle into the smooth flow of the melodies? Here, in Raleigh, North Carolina the whip-poor-wills, gray catbirds, nelson's sparrows and many other kinds of birds sing to their hearts' content welcoming the spring. I seem to hear them singing in English and I get nostalgic and seem to hear Carpenters' Only Yesterday….and Corrs' What can I do to make you love me... as I blend into their world! The birds that sing fast cheery notes seem to be more into the latest Hindi hit songs like the dagabaz or sopnome aite jaite!

Imagination of birds singing in different languages is not so wild! After all some migratory birds are known to mimic tunes they hear on their long flights! Lyre birds are well known singers of mixtures of other bird songs they hear. There are talking birds that can mimic human speech. The hill myna, a common pet and the European sterling are well known to mimic the human voices. Is not the human race getting stressed out with technology and trying to find some solitude in nature? Well, the day might be coming when a radio, a TV channel, or a website on Internet will start offering only the songs of our feathery friends! The human mind works in unpredictable ways and you may soon be buying tickets to listen to a particular “Birds' Concert of the Year”!

Tulip Chowdhury writes fiction and is a poet.