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Winter 2006

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Lessons in the Sand

Prerequisite

Name That Warble

—Leslie Wolfe ’80G




	Professor emeritus Donald Kroodsma devotes his research to the whys and wherefores of birdsong. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

IN LATE AUGUST, AN HOUR before dawn, Donald Kroodsma stands in the Station Road parking lot of the Norwottuck Rail Trail in South Amherst listening intently as the birds begin to wake. Kroodsma hears a brief whew and turns his head to locate the noise: “What is that?” His question is startling. If anyone should know the answer, he should. He has spent the last 35 years recording and transcribing birdsong, is the author of many scholarly treatises on the subject, and has recently published a popular work, The Singing Life of Birds.

The professor emeritus is not giving a pop quiz, though—he’s actually pursuing a new line of inquiry. He cocks his head as the whew recurs in the darkness above. “It could be a veery—or some kind of thrush,” he says, “but where is it?” He hears a loud squawk as a bird rises from Lawrence Swamp. “A great blue heron,” he says dismissively, and in a moment (“There he goes”) points skyward at the bird’s flapping silhouette. But his curiosity is focused on the mysterious intermittent calls.

During his long career, including more than 20 years as a biology professor at UMass Amherst, Kroodsma has listened to the “dawn chorus,” mostly in the spring when birds are in full voice, repeating their songs for extended periods to claim territories and advertise their availability. Mining the rich resources of springtime song has been the basis of his research, but now that he is retired from teaching, he’s going out at all times of the year (like now, in late summer, when the birds “quiet down”), and what he finds sometimes surprises him.

He starts up his tape recorder, puts on his headphones, and points his parabolic reflector at the sky. The transparent dish, about two feet in diameter, funnels sound into a microphone at its center. Transmitted to headphones, the sound is like, in the phrase of a photographer, “binocular hearing.” Kroodsma soon smiles. “It’s not one bird, it’s many,” he says, taking off the headphones. “They’re flying overhead—migrating.” The sounds above him suddenly stop. The birds have likely moved on. But with daylight approaching, they will soon end their nighttime flight and settle into trees for rest and refueling.

After all his years of study, the sounds of this migration are new to him, and he’s delighted. The scene is a replay of the start of his self-described lifelong journey when, as a graduate student, he asked a question and searched for an answer.

The seminal question for Kroodsma was, “Just how does a singing bird get his song?” In 1969, it was unknown whether a young wren learns his songs from his father or from other birds after he leaves home. After several years of studying the Bewick’s wren, identifying hundreds of natives in a small habitat, establishing their lineages, and recording their songs on audio tape and on “sonograms” (sound spectrograms), he had his answer: In the first few weeks of life, the young wren learned Dad’s songs, but after he left home and established his own territory, he learned to repeat the songs of his neighbors, with his father’s songs seemingly forgotten.

Kroodsma cycles along the bike path in the growing light. As the day dawns and the birds awake, he identifies the voices: wood thrushes, cardinals, catbirds, great horned owls, phoebes (fee-bees), and kingfishers. As the ducks stir in Lawrence Swamp, he catalogs the Eastern wood-pewee, goldfinches, a young red-eyed vireo, a marsh wren, Carolina wrens, and a nuthatch.

In this ornithologist’s Eden, Kroodsma asks one of his favorite unanswered questions. “What happened way back in time that split the bird species?” he muses, referring to the fact that some birds learn their songs while others don’t—in contrast to the wren, some birds, such as our phoebe, have inborn calls. The answer to this question—why some vocalizations are learned while others are innate—is one that Kroodsma would like to discover in his lifetime, and that answer should be of interest to humans because other primates do not learn to vocalize. In his latest book he writes, “Perhaps as we study why some birds learn to sing and others don’t, we can learn more about ourselves, too, and why we are different from the chimpanzees and other great apes.”

Back in the parking lot, lifting his bike atop his car, Kroodsma makes plans based on the morning’s discovery. He has decided to stake out a remote hill near Quabbin Reservoir where he’ll sit out all night, pointing his parabola at the sky to record the sounds of those migratory birds. This experience will doubtless spark new questions and, perhaps, new discoveries that will tell us more about birds—and about ourselves.

Donald Kroodsma’s latest book, The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birds (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), includes sonograms, an audio CD, and instructions on how to listen to and record birdsong.

Visit Professor Kroodsma's UMass web page at: www.bio.umass.edu/biology/faculty/kroodsma.phtml

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