Brave earth ost1/7/2023 ![]() Listen now to what is to come: this is your song. He paused, bowing his head, to let a Boeing 707 screech over or a Harley Davidson rumble by. Listen! he would say, as he led a parade of people down the river trail. My father was a park naturalist whose job was to help people fall in love with a patch of beech-maple forest between the final approach to the Cleveland Hopkins Airport and State Route 237. Primed by this code, the young cowbirds mimic the sound that comes next. It’s a chattering sound that says, listen now to what is to come: this is your song. How will they learn the liquid song that will attract a cowbird mate? It turns out that adult cowbirds use a “code word” to get their young to listen closely to them alone. ![]() It carries a risk, though, because just at the time when cowbird chicks should be picking up their parents’ gurglewhisp, the nestlings hear instead the okalee, yank-yank, what cheer, sweet-sweet, keeer of the songs of other species. The cowbird’s strategy-brood parasitism-is economical, offloading the costs of raising their chicks onto another nesting pair. Unwitting, the other parents try to feed the insatiable, begging babies, even as the oversized cowbird chicks crowd the other nestlings over the edge and claim their insects and worms. The cowbird lays her eggs in the nests of other birds-red-winged blackbirds, warblers, or even hummingbirds. What will become of us, as the racket of industrial America drowns out Earth’s songs? Brown-Headed Cowbird So he is no more able to sing a love song than an oil-field meadowlark. His parents might have cranked up the volume on the Magnavox while they mixed the Manhattans, but nobody sang. There was noise aplenty in my husband’s house while he was growing up-four siblings, a German shepherd, mowers and motorcycles, bouncing basketballs. Acoustic ecologists compare the new songs to the language of the military-sharp, pragmatic commands intended to be heard over the thud of artillery and bombs. And so meadowlarks learn songs that are broken: approximations, only, of what the meadowlark song could be. The noise is so overpowering that the nestlings can no longer hear their parents sing. The oil fields now ring with metal against metal, drill bits against slab rock, truck tires on asphalt, and methane flares like jet engines against the hard sky. Then, what was once called the prairie became known as the Bakken, one of the greatest deposits of oil and natural gas in the country. The nestlings learned these songs from their singing parents, and this is how it was for millennia, lyrical song after song. ![]() Sleep lu lidi lidi juvi, they slurped, perched on snags above the green waves of grass. ![]() The tallgrass prairie in what is now North Dakota rang with the songs of meadowlarks. We weren’t sure: If she perished, could we sing without her connection to the Earth? Could the wind sing without aspen leaves? Western Meadowlark All things shall perish from under the sky, she sang. Sometimes she cried when she sang the songs, and we knew even then that these were love songs to the vanished places she still longed for. She sang campfire songs about canoe trails and the sweet smell of bracken ferns and pine, or Scottish folksongs- the bonnie bloomin’ heather-that her own mother sang to her back in Thornaby-on-Tees. She sang us to sleep, sitting on the edge of the bed on long Cleveland nights. My sisters and I learned songs from our mother. The broken songs are, ecologists say, “the sound of extinction.” And the species plummets toward oblivion. So males sing their broken, useless songs, while females, laden with unripe eggs, wait for the song they will never hear. A young male might mimic other birds in the forest, and this is a disaster, because the lovely honeyeater females can only respond to the traditional song. As a result, the young cannot learn to sing their species’ songs. In fact, there are so few honeyeaters singing in the fragments of forested woodland slopes that it is unlikely a young one will ever hear the song of another regent honeyeater after it leaves the nest. The regent honeyeater in Australia, a black and yellow wattlebird, is critically endangered. Kathleen Dean Moore considers the looming loss of wild music heard in the songs of birds-and the vital stories woven into them that are calling for us to listen.
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