In order to answer that, I first need to be clear about what, for me at least, bird language is NOT about.
Bird language is not like learning English or French or whatever. The sounds that birds make can’t be translated into exact literal meaning. There will never be a Google-translate app for birds (Flycatcher-to-English please Google?). Why not? Well, for a start humans and birds last shared a common ancestor some 300 million years ago. That was the last time we shared a common communication system. Timeframes of that nature tend to create uncrossable language barriers.
Birds are dinosaurs after all. To be clear, I don’t mean that as in “they evolved from” dinosaurs. They ARE actual dinosaurs. In fact, they’re amongst the relatively few dinosaur groups that survived the Chicxulub meteorite strike and subsequent planetary roasting some 65 million years back. In many ways that meteorite was their meal ticket to taking over the planet. In the tens of millions of years after the cataclysm while mammals slowly evolved bigger brains, birds were the most intelligent creatures on Earth.
So, when I was lying in bed earlier this morning listening to a Superb Lyrebird singing outside my window, I was being serenaded by a highly intelligent, dinosaur troubadour. The brain, body and songs of that lyrebird have pretty much remained unaltered for some 35 million years, just like the rainforest it inhabits. In contrast, humanity has only been remotely human for a couple of million years and a distinct species for some 300,000 years.
So, no matter how skilled you get at learning bird language, it always amounts to indirect translation involving loads of situational inference, observational insight and context-specific interpretation. But that will prove to be more than enough for our purposes.
Why Bird Language? Why Not Crocodile Language?
The “language” of birds is pretty much as foreign to us as the “language” of Tyrannosaurus Rex (if they were still amongst us) or crocodiles.
I don’t know about you, but Tyrannosaurus or crocodile language workshops don’t sound all that inviting, or even remotely safe for that matter. But unlike T-rex and crocs, birds live virtually everywhere on the planet – certainly everywhere where we also live. Furthermore, there’s bloody billions of them, they come in thousands of different varieties, they’re mostly (the songbirds at least) very chatty and generally they’re not lethally-dangerous to approach. There are exceptions of course, such as Cassowary, but on the whole they make for absolutely delightful company for a socially gregarious animal like us.
No matter where you live there’s bound to be a community of birds sharing the space with you. And, in many circumstances they will be the most intelligent creatures sharing this space. Most children on the planet will likely have their first wild interaction (friendship even) with a bird. Other than family pets, bird are nearly always going to be our closest non-human companions in this life.
Ok, that being said, if we can’t get a direct translation of what birds are chirping-on about, just what can we learn? Moreover, why bother to learn bird language at all?
Well, because birds are your best and most generous guides for learning about absolutely everything there is to know about a natural landscape. That’s why. And it’s cool to know stuff other people don’t.
Birds as Nature Connection Jedi Masters
To be clear, bird language isn’t limited to the sounds birds make. Just like people, there’s loads of non-verbal communication going on and it all means stuff. In my experience, a bird’s non-verbal language provides the critical subtext to make sense of the song and calls.
So, when I hear a staccato “Geiger-counter” call start up on the track down to the garden, it only makes sense to me as an alarm call once I see the stressed posture and persistent, directional attention of the Yellow-throated Scrubwren making the call. Finding a huge Carpet Python curled up in the nearby firewood pile merely confirms what I already suspected from the scrubwren’s call and behaviour.
So, learning bird language involves far more than simply listening to chirps and squarks. It’s a “whole-of-bird” approach. Actually, it’s even more integrated than that, it’s more of a “whole-of-nature” approach.
Ok, so what I want you to take away from all this, is that by learning how to pay attention to the communication, behaviour and situational context of your local birds you’ll actually be tapping into a kind of superpower. The superpower of deep nature connection.
To sum it all up then, learning bird language isn’t about striving for a word-for-word translation from bird-to-person, that’s impossible. No, it’s actually about deepening our capacity and enjoyment of being meaningfully connected to the natural world rather than always feeling like an awkward tourist, forever looking in but never truly arriving. This is how you become a “local”.
Bird language is the best way I know of for fast-tracking the development of your nature observation skills. Learning to pay attention to detail. To notice everything in your environment and open your sensory experience of being part of a larger community of life. Wild-life.
Birds are our Nature Connection Jedi Masters. Submit to them and become ONE with the Force…
See also: You were once a Bird Language Samurai, and can be again