Singing nature's tune.

• Author: Rothenberg, David
• Position: Ecology

HOW TO EXPLAIN the vast beauty and diversity of nature? For many years I have used music to try to answer this question. As a professor of philosophy and music, I have been able to explore this unusual approach to understanding the natural world. In one of my books, I compare what science, poetry, and music have to say about bird song and, in the end, I was most satisfied joining in with the songs of laughing thrushes and lyrebirds with my own clarinet, making an interspecies music, its beauty and logic, like any music, hard to quantify, but still somehow making sense. I tried the same approach with the songs of an animal much less known and experienced than birds, the whale, and, in particular, the humpback whale, an animal who sings the longest song of all, a solo aria that can go on for up to 23 hours at a time. Music makes its message known in mysterious ways, and sometimes can help us go beyond the limits of the human species. Why should whales and birds, two animals so different from each other, make sounds that somehow seem related? I brought my clarinet out to these creatures' native habitats to see what would happen.

The Albert's lyrebird of Australia is one of the most impressive of all birds, with long curved plumes like the ancient Greek lyre and a powerful song to match. He is one of few birds to combine a magnificent appearance with an awesome and exact courtship display. Beneath his bouquet of a tail, he is like a small brown pheasant, running quietly through the Queensland mountain rain forests, silent and inconspicuous, until he decides he wants to be beard, which is every day during the winter breeding season. Then he performs one of the most precisely choreographed rituals in the entire world of fowl.

Every morning just before dawn, he tosses his shimmering tail feathers tight over his head like an umbrella, his face all but hidden. Like a matador disguised behind a cape, he starts with a territorial call, announcing his place: breaap booua bwe ba boo pu tee! Then he begins a series of flawless imitations of many of the other birds that share his home--satin bowerbirds, rosella parrots, yellow honeyeaters, kookaburras. After several cycles repeating this song of imitations, he embarks on a back-and-forth kind of dance, with his two feet on the vines, shaking them enough so that the trees high up in front and behind him also shake, and he emits a different, precise type of rhythmic music that is original and exact: gronk gronk gronk brr brr brr brr brr. The entire forest rattles with his dancing. His head is invisible; the feathers embrace him. After a few rounds, he will take a break to claw the forest floor with his large talons, looking for roots and grubs to eat, before moving on to the next platform to start the performance yet again.

In the natural world, a song and dance as spectacular as this can mean only one thing--this display is what female lyrebirds like to see and hear. Generations of female preference have led to the survival of appearances, songs, and behavior that might otherwise seem excessive and extreme. Yet, the chances that the lyrebird's impressive show will lead to mating success are quite slim. Female Albert's lyrebirds lay a single egg only once every two...