For the Love of Birdsongs

Since literature began, poets and naturalists have coined words and phrases which attempt to replicate the sounds birds make. Their legacy is a glorious vocabulary of thousands of unique words, from the aaaaw of the black skimmer to the zzzzzd of the lazuli bunting. A muddled, contentious, and inconsistent vocabulary, the harvest of the jottings of different naturalists in different places, who hear differently and record differently, whose variation is boundless and consensus occasional: Their liberty and ours to spell the “words” of birds as promiscuously as the Elizabethans spelled the spoken word. Twenty-five years ago I sought for the first time to collect, sift, and standardize these wonderful, bizarre words with their anarchic spellings, absurd pronunciations, and uncertain meanings. That project culminated in “Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds,” the appendice to which is featured below. Here, we see the history of alternative attempts to collect bird songs and sounds, from musical composition through recording devices to duck calls, bird organs, singing bird automata, and varieties of bird clock.