The Instrument: Birdsong

     Today, I'm going to start off this blog post a little differently; I will start by telling you a little story. It was July of 2014, July 21st, to be exact, and I had gone to a Phish show that evening. It was the best concert that I have ever been to, but that is a story for a different time. When I returned home with my brother and a couple friends, we relaxed for a little, told a couple stories, listened to some music, and just enjoyed each others company until the clock showed 3:30 A.M. It had been a long day of phenomenal music and general mental and physical stimulation, so around this time, we decided to call it a night (or a really early morning) and head to bed.

     But for some reason, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find sleep and it surely could not find me. I tossed and turned in bed for a little until I realized that there was no point in seeking slumber; I  knew that it would find me eventually when my active mind decided to take a break. So, I climbed out of bed, threw on some clothes, and headed downstairs. I sat on my couch for a while, doodling in a notebook. I looked at the clock again: 4:15 A.M. That's when I heard the first one. A singular, subtly sharp whistle pierced the silence of the darkness outside. It was a birdsong, and for some reason, this I was captivated by this lone bird, crying out while not a single person was awake to hear it. I was startled. I never noticed how early the birds sing in the morning since I'm usually asleep by four in the morning. 

     I then thought of the hundreds of birds that would soon rise and answer the call of this early bird, and in a moment of curiosity and boredom, I draped a blanket around my shoulders to keep me warm, and I walked out onto my balcony and sat down, just listening. I heard another whistle, and it was the very same progression of sounds that I had heard earlier. The tonality of this birdsong was so unique that I thought to myself, it must be the same bird. 4:35 A.M, and a few birds had answered the first bird's call. Either that or they were starting up new conversations with other birds. Now, the calls were all different, and if I put my mind to it, it was quite easy to differentiate the songs of the different birds. I noticed the shrilly whistle of the original bird, but I also noticed a soft, wind-like birdsong. I heard a deeper, guttier coo of a presumably larger bird. Then, I noticed a melodic voice, a bird that would almost run up and down our musical scale, forming sentences from whistles. 

     Soon enough, I was sitting out there at dawn, listening to something like this...

Just listen, and continue reading.

     I must have sat out there for almost two hours. The sun had just broken over the horizon and shades of orange and yellow began dancing amongst the trees across from the balcony. By this time, the birdsongs were abundant, and the hundreds of birdcalls were instruments in a grand avian symphony. It wasn't until I was sitting out in the balcony in my pajamas that I realized that instrumentation is just as prevalent in nature as it is in our lives. Through a variety of melodies, tones, and pitches, all species of birds are able to express themselves and are understood by others. They are able to communicate fear, anger, happiness, the desire to mate, and every emotion in the spectrum of feeling through their calls, their instruments. Isn't this exactly what we do? As artists, musicians, and intellectuals, don't we take the tools made available to us to make sense of the world and to tell our own stories? Well this shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, human beings are from nature too. We just seem to have forgotten that.