Joining the Choir

I was 10 and an enthusiastic member of the boys’ choir when the church hired a new choirmaster. After the second rehearsal, the choirmaster, Mr. Powell, a small, intense and proper figure of a man, asked me to come sit next to him at the piano. He struck the white middle C key and asked me to sing it, then and so on slowly up the scale. I had been singing scales in the choir warm ups for about a year, and was pleased with the special attention. But soon I learned that the notes I sang bore no resemblance to the notes from the piano. It had never occurred to me that they should particularly. Then Mr. Powell asked me if I would consider dropping out of the choir. I had no idea what to say, especially in front of everyone who had watched the humiliating performance. In the end, faced with silent tears, he relented but asked that I only mouth the anthem. However, singing was over for me—for the rest of my life, actually. The thrill was gone, as B.B. King would sing years later.

Thus, choirs do not occupy a warm and special place in the heart.

Which is why I now find it odd that now so many years later I cannot get enough of the choir I listen to in my yard every morning. Bird songs, especially in the spring when they are at their most melodious, are a pure joy, perhaps because none of them has to please a fastidious choirmaster. Nor do you need to know how to reproduce middle C to appreciate them. I cannot get enough of them; each song has its own tone and rhythm; each singer is so enthusiastic and idiosyncratic, how can you not want to sing yourself?

I did not start listening to bird songs until I was a student in forestry school. Like all young forester types with an inclination toward introversion, I assumed that forestry was about wandering through large tacks of woodlands looking at trees and listening to nature—birds, even. Shortly after I got my first job, it began to dawn on me that forestry is not about managing trees, it’s about managing the lumberjacks who cut the trees—just as fisheries is not about managing fish, it’s about managing fishermen, so you can forget being an introvert—but you might want to remember bird songs. It helps.

I remember distinctly the first bird call I identified in the field during my first spring in forestry school. With another classmate, we heard a long and melodious song pouring out from a nearby tree and decided we just had to know what rare bird could be producing such a lovely song. We crept up toward an old oak just beginning to leaf out, slowly, slowly, with a pair of clunky Bushnell field glasses between us. There, in the top of the branches, silhouetted against the gray sky, was a medium sized bird, head thrown back, beak to the sky, spilling out a progression of heart rending notes for all he was worth. When we got the glasses on him and in focus, we noted his slate gray back and inflated red breast. We had discovered a “¦robin! How could we have never noticed his singing or his song. (Is it really the singer, not the song?)

One of the important distinctions to make is that there are bird songs and then there are bird calls. Take our state bird, for instance, the black cap chickadee. Chickadees are named for their call—chick-a-dee-dee-dee, which is not a mating call, lest you be fooled, but a warning call to other members of their flock, with whom they spend the fall and winter after rearing their young. The chickadees’ mating song, which they save for late winter, is a sweet and pure two or three notes that I hear as dee-do, dee-do, but birders also describe as sweetie pie, sweetie pie.

Cardinals, too, are now resident in Maine all winter and are usually the first of the Pavarottis to mount the late winter stage and unleash an aria to attract a new spring mate. I hear their song as pret, pret, pret, pretty; pret, pret, pret, pretty. Very pretty, too, in their vermilion operatic robes. But the most manic call of the woods comes from the pileated woodpecker, which I cannot render phonetically, but if you are ancient enough to remember the Woody Woodpecker cartoons, Walter Lantz’ wife, Grace, did a spectacularly antic rendition of their call that lives on and on.

Spring migrants arrive in early May and unpack a burst of new songs from their travels. You can start by learning a few of the most distinctive songs of the warblers (there is actually a Tennessee warbler, which is not a country western singer, but an actual avian). Learning a few of the warbler’s songs is more satisfying than trying to identify them, since they hop about in the dense branches of spruce trees and are frustratingly difficult to spot. But their songs are all around you. In our neck of the woods, you want to listen for the zee, zee, zee, zee zu, zee of the black-throated green warbler and the zeeeeeeeeeeee-up of the Parula warbler. Out in brushy fields reverting to shrub lands, you can’t miss the witchety, witchety, witchety, witch of the yellow throat warbler, nor the sweet, sweet, sweet, I’m so sweet of its cousin the yellow warbler. You will also be especially charmed by the polite introduction to the chestnut-sided warbler’s song, pleased, pleased, pleased to meetcha.

So there you have it—a whole choir to enjoy every spring morning and evening without having to fret about hitting middle C for churlish Mr. Powell.