Bird song focus of discussion at the Cary Institute

MILLBROOK — The hills are alive with the sound of male songbirds. For most of us, this persistent chirp, cackle, whistle and tweet is little more than background chatter, inconsequential and, in any case, indecipherable. But between birds, science has learned, it is richly communicative.Early in May at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies’ auditorium in Millbrook, a standing-room-only crowd of bird lovers turned up to see and hear one of the world’s foremost ornithologists explain a bit about where bird songs originate and why birds sing the way they do. Professor Donald Kroodsma has spent his professional life listening and recording bird song by himself and with teams in a great variety of Western Hemisphere locations, from Saskatchewan to the Falkland Islands, and not a few places in the Tri-corner area. One welcome result is his volume, “The Singing Life of Birds,” which chronicles his life as an ornithologist.Kroodsma grew up in western lower Michigan. He was drawn to science but didn’t settle on ornithology until his last college semester, when he chose to study bird migration through the avian visitors to a local marsh. This led him to the marsh wren and what turned out to a lifelong fascination with this small, vocal bird — and a source of several important ornithological discoveries. Birders have a reputation for being rather quiet, studious, solemn folk. Kroodsma in prose and person is anything but. His book’s tone echoes that of his Cary lecture: eagerly inquisitive, self-aware (as scientists must be), single-minded and cheerfully persistent. The richest period of the day for capturing bird song is the hour from the first faint glimmer of light to dawn, often called the dawn chorus. Reading his fascinating book, it is easy to imagine arising well before this time to rendezvous with him on the edge of an Oregon meadow or the cattail marsh south of Tivoli before beginning several hours of painstaking recording and analysis.His pursuit of the marsh wren started, as all pioneering science tends to, with a fundamental question that no one had adequately answered: Why do birds sing? This soon led to other fundamental questions: How do birds become songsters? Why are bird songs different? What connects a bird’s song with its life experience? In more than 35 years of field and laboratory work to date, Kroodsma’s hard-won discoveries have deepened understanding of the natural world close around us and led to him being recognized by the American Ornithologists’ Union as “the reigning authority on the biology of avian vocal behavior.”Kroodsma’s methods have been simple, if laborious. In the field, he identifies a species he wants to study, locates several members, then records them until he is sure he has captured the full range of their repertoire — from fewer than a dozen songs for the common blue jay to, in an extreme case, more than 2,000 for the brown thrasher. His gear (as of 2007): A Sound Devices 722 recorder, a parabolic-dish microphone, headphones, a poncho, flashlights, binoculars and a Crazy Creek camping chair. An appendix obligingly discusses equipment with much advice for the beginner and amateur on a limited budget, and begins with a good-natured warning: Recording bird song “can become additive … don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”Kroodsma’s discoveries have often involved differences indistinguishable to the untrained ear. Fascinated at one point by the eastern bluebird’s absence in the literature of avian song, he sets out to learn why. Since the first bird emerged 150 million years ago, avian species have multiplied until there are some 10,000 on the planet now. While new species occasionally emerge due to further genetic specialization, far more are lost because of habitat destruction, pollution, pesticides and global warming.“The Singing Life of Birds” is the impassioned report of a first-rate scientist determined to get to the bottom a fundamental question few others have asked. In a world — or certainly a country — where science is often misconstrued as a political agenda, Kroodsma’s life work is both a stirring reminder of the true value of science and an infectious summons to the pleasures and rewards of ornithology.Tom Parrett is a writer who lives in Millerton and Greenwich Village.

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less