We are hard wired to listen carefully to birds. To listen and learn. Hard wired in the head literally. Our brains are the top-shelf product of millions of years of neurological tinkering for maximising survival fitness. Every single one of my (and your) ancestors lived to breeding age, going back to the time when animals evolved from plants, when plants evolved from single celled flecks of primordial life. An unbroken linage of survival. The brain remembers and keeps the score.
It remembers the time before screens, before shopping centres, before guns, before Bert Newton, before hospital emergency departments, before books and before take-away pizza. It remembers when the planet had its full and untamed contingent of wildlife, a fair proportion of which sported ginormous claws and gleaming teeth which they used to good effect hunting and consuming humans, especially children.
It remembers that the birds kept watch on the movement of such lethal predators, they are always vigilant. And it remembers that through listening to the birds one could track the movement of predators and significantly increase the odds of staying one-step-ahead of meeting a treacherous fate before sundown.
It remembers and it remains ready to listen again. Because listening to the language of birds, most especially the alarm language of birds, was one of the most critical tools in our ancestral survival-kit. It is simply impossible that even a single one of our ancestors before the invention of agriculture and settled villages wasn’t a master of interpreting bird language. A veritable ‘bird language Samurai”. It was as essential as knowing how to make fire without matches or knapping a knife from stone.
To my way of thinking then, anything that was so crucial to upping the odds on surviving to breeding age for millions of hominids living across hundreds of thousands or even tens of millions of years (recall that monkeys still pay attention to bird alarm) will be easier to learn then something completely new and unfamiliar.
The real problem for most of us living in the 21st century is that the measurable consequences for not knowing bird language (alarm in particular) are very close to being zero. In fact, a person can take absolutely no interest in nature (let alone something so nuanced as bird alarm) for their entire life and still successfully attract a mate, breed and die at an advanced age. It’s a tragedy if you ask me, which most people don’t for obvious reasons.