Monday, January 16, 2006, 11:18 pm
A litany I couldn’t understand
THE METROPLEX, TEXAS — This morning, I watched big black crows strutting up and down a quiet suburban street in southwest Dallas. There’d been just enough drizzle to dampen the concrete, but I daresay it won’t touch the drought.
After a few minutes, someone pulled out of a driveway and scattered the crows. Two ended up just outside the window from which I watched.
One preened, but the other began to caw.
On and on the bird called, and at last I started to pay attention. It was not an unbroken monotony of evenly pitched calls — no, the bursts of sound lasted longer, or shorter, and the pitch of the caws was not constant. Sometimes one was different from those that surrounded it. Sometimes a new burst started on a higher pitch than the final notes of the previous series.
It had to be saying something; this couldn’t be meaningless sound. Occasionally there was a faint reply, but that lone bird cried on and on.
Was it like a language? Did pitch and duration communicate — well, ideas?
“Hey! There’s a bunch of drowning earthworms on the concrete! Yum!”
Actually, I don’t know whether there were any earthworms or not.
“If any more of you four-wheeled nincompoops think you’re going to bust up our party, you’d better think again! If there’s one thing we don’t tolerate around here, it’s idiots!”
Or did the bird even remember what had happened?
Please forgive my anthropomorphizing. The moment we begin to really watch the birds, our understanding balks.
I remember the very first day Jason and I took the Puritan Birder to Lake o’ the Pines. What, she wanted to know, was a heron doing?
The question nonplussed me. The bird was huddled on a stump, or flying, or maybe both, but what was it — doing?
What was the crow doing today? Was it communication? A poem? An aria? A hymn?
Let me put it more directly. We can dimly ascertain the functions of sounds and behaviors. But we want to know why the heron left its perch to cross the lake, or why the crow continued to shout.
No matter what we come to understand, to offer as explanation, we are in the end outsiders. Observers. Wonderers.
David J. Ringer
on 17 Jan 2006 at 4:34 pm 1.Lynn said …
Sometimes the same applies with people.
on 17 Jan 2006 at 6:38 pm 2.djr said …
I don’t think it is the same. Our confusion about human behavior arises from the fact that we ourselves are human. We don’t understand why someone made a choice, or we think we can’t imagine what a loss or dogma must feel like. But even if we don’t know what it’s like to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, at least we know what it’s like to wear shoes (and here I suppose I must use the phrase metaphorically).
But it is as total aliens that we must watch the birds.