The best thing about a visit or walk in the woods or close to nature are the birds!
I can make these nice bird calls using whistles! The bird calls I used to hear early in the morning during our village visits or occasionally even in Bangalore used to be so nice!
I miss them so much! Morning does not feel like morning without them! Maybe which is why I am usually very groggy in the morning!
Then again anyone who sings very well especially a lady singer is called a nightingale! Which is surprising! Why you will find out soon enough!
The nightingale and its song is often quoted in literature and poetry as a metaphor for love, beauty and for poetry itself.
However these frequently refer to the singing nightingale as a female when it is actually the male that sings!
Of course the Male nightingales sing to serenade migrating females down as they fly over!
In fact the first ever live radio broadcast of birdsong was of a nightingale in ‘concert’ with the cellist, Beatrice Harrison, on 19 May 1924 in Oxted, Surrey and it was so successful that Beatrice received 50,000 fan letters!
The nightingale of India was Lata Mangeshkar whose birth anniversary was the other day!
Birds sing from their chest using a special voice box called a syrinx, allowing some species to make two different pitches at the same time!
So then nature is amazing! Which is why Birds like the North American cowbird can move the left and right sides of their voice box independently to sing two tones at once!
You also have a huge range which depends on the species!
So while a song sparrow knows about 10 songs, a brown thrasher can sing up to 2,000 different tunes!
The most famous bird as far as novels is concerned are the mockingbirds! They have been named aptly since they are Master mimics! An average Northern mockingbird can copy over 200 sounds, including frogs, car alarms, and other birds! Now that is a talent!
Then again it does not come naturally! True songbirds are not born knowing how to sing; they must listen to adults and practice just like humans learning a language!
For all the range and the emotions and the mimics, scientists have found that thousands of bird songs worldwide are built from just eight basic sound types like trills and whistles!
Just like our sapta swaras!
For now you can simply listen to the traffic noise and imagine birds singing! Or if your imaginaitons are limited you can watch a Yash Chopra movie!
Shubh ratri…
