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1 The featured interspecies story for May
Bear Ethics and Fly Aesthetics is an excerpt from The Beluga Cafe, by Jim Nollman. It relates the odd Arctic tale of three musicians composing and conducting a symphony performed by an orchestra of flies buzzing over a concert hall of bear scat.
2 Interspecies News
- Over the past two years, Interspecies.com and greenmuseum.org have co-produced The Belly of the Whale Music Project, which now involves 18 composers from ten different countries. On May 21, the Belly of the Whale Project takes a new turn, making its concert debut as the headline event for the San Juan Island Orca Fest. Check out the Orca Fest web page for the schedule of this upcoming event. Or click on the Belly page to hear excerpts of this music.
- Also in May, Interspecies own Jim Nollman and Mark Fischer will be filmed by National Geographic for a European TV special about animal communication. On location in Monterey Bay, Nollman will attempt musical interaction with bottlenose dolphins and gray whales. The interaction will be recorded on a powerbook, using a phenomenal software called Melodyne, which displays audio data as waveform, musical notation, and phonetics, all at the same time. Fischer will do the analyis in realtime using his own wavelet technology. It is the second National Geo filming of interspecies in the past 3 years.
3 Listening to the Birds
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Interspecies received two books in April, on the subject of bird songs. Both possess stunningly beautiful covers. Both also have companion CDs.
Why Bird’s Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird song, by David Rothenberg, (Basic Books 2005)
Click to visit David Rothenberg's website about bird song.
David is an advisor to Interspecies.com He is a professor of philosophy, and an often-recorded clarinetist, with an abiding interest in adapting music to communicate with other species. He is also one of the featured composers in our own Belly of the Whale Project.
Why Birds Sing provides an engaging overview to the entire subject of bird song. It develops as an entertaining narrative that seamlessly merges biology, music, and poetry to unfold its story. Why? As David makes amply clear, the human drive to understand and attach meaning to bird song can only be told accurately by granting equal authority to poets like Walt Whitman and Keats, composers like Oliver Messiaen, and a small community of biologists, naturalists, and acoustic engineers, the wisest of whom clearly recognize poetry and music as equal partners in this venture.
The birds he describes display personality, intelligence and eye-opening social skills. From the interspecies perspective of honoring the animals, its most important conclusion is that bird song is certainly our most accessible example for undertanding precisely how certain other species learn from their elders a sense of aesthetics informed by internal rules, and sophisticated improvisational techniques. Several birds utilize the same scales as human musicians. So who invented music, birds or humans? After reading this book, and then listening a few times to the incredible song of the lyrebird on the CD, I conclude it is really no contest.
The CD for Rothenberg's book must be purchased separately. It features musicians interacting with birds from several places around the planet.
Nature’s Music: The Science of Birdsong, Peter Marler and Hans Slabbekorn (Elsevier, 2004)
Visit this website for info about the conference, in memory of bird expert, Louis Baptista, that inspired this anthology.
Although this is a scientist’s book—a collection of professional papers and essays about birdsong—it pays its dues to the poets, naturalists and musicians wqho have always been an essneital part of the discussion. Likewise, it subtly acknowledges bird song as an art form evolved among another family of sentient beings. If you enjoyed David Rothenberg’s overview of a book, and desire a more in-depth explanation of how bird brains work, how various species physically generate those exotic timbres, the tools and methods of acoustic science, and a good explanation of current biology on the subject, then this your book. How to describe the narrative? If you took a college-level course on bird song or bio-acoustics, i guarantee you would be thrilled to be assigned this accessible book as the main text.
The two CDs that accompany this book are absolute gems, containing more than 200 sound samples of various birds. Almost every sound you hear is also explained in some detail within the text, most of these accompanied by sonograms. Digital composers take note of this resource as a sample library. And get permission.
Reading these two accounts of bird song research has been an enlightening experience for this reviewer who mostly explores whale vocalizations as a source for discovering another species' aesthetics and language. By contrast to the open-minded bird acousticians, the whale research community seems overly close-minded, intellectually bigoted, and exclusivist about allowing poets and musicians, even naturalists and nature writers share their turf. As if the rest of us need their permission. If I could be granted a wish, it would that these two books—ideally prefaced by this review— be mandatory reading by every young graduate student of whale behavior, everywhere in the world. I do not exaggerate to conclude that, if whale research began to reflect some of the ecumenical traits of bird research, it would inspire a veritable transformation in cetacean science. The whales, many of whom exist on the brink of extinction (and who are about to fall prey to increased whaling by several Asian countries) would be the foremost beneficiaries.
For an online review of the study of birdsong check out this website.
4 Prairie Dog Language
Prairie dogs, those rodents popping in and out of holes on vacant lots and rural rangeland, are talking up a storm. They have different "words'' for tall human in yellow shirt, short human in green shirt, coyote, deer, red-tailed hawk and many other creatures. They can even coin new terms for things they've never seen before, independently coming up with the same calls or words, according to Con Slobodchikoff, a Northern Arizona University biology professor and prairie dog linguist. Prairie dogs of the Gunnison's species, which Slobodchikoff has studied, speak different dialects in Grants and Taos, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; and Monarch Pass, Colo., but they would likely understand one another, the professor says. "So far, I think we are showing the most sophisticated communication system that anyone has shown in animals,'' Slobodchikoff said.
Prairie dog chatter is variously described by observers as a series of yips, high-pitched barks or eeks. And most scientists think prairie dogs simply make sounds that reflect their inner condition. That means all they're saying are things like "ouch'' or "hungry'' or "eek.'' Linguists have set five criteria that must be met for something to qualify as language: It must contain words with abstract meanings; possess syntax in which the order of words is part of their meaning; have the ability to coin new words; be composed of smaller elements; and use words separated in space and time from what they represent.
"I've been chipping away at all of these,'' Slobodchikoff said. He and his students have done work in the field and in a laboratory. With digital recorders, they record the calls prairie dogs make as they see different people, dogs of different sizes and with different coat colors, hawks, elk. They analyze the sounds using a computer that dissects the underlying structure and creates a sonogram, or visual representation of the sound. Computer analysis later identifies the similarities and differences. The prairie dogs have calls for various predators but also for elk, deer, antelope and cows. "It's as if they're trying to inform one another what's out there,'' Slobodchikoff said. So far, he has recorded at least 20 different "words.'' Some of those words or calls were created by the prairie dogs when they saw something for the first time. Four prairie dogs in Slobodchikoff's lab were shown a great-horned owl and European ferret, two animals they had likely not seen before, if only because the owls are mostly nocturnal and this kind of ferret is foreign. The prairie dogs independently came up with the same new calls. Slobodchikoff has also played back a recorded prairie dog alarm call for coyote in a prairie dog colony when no coyote was around. The prairie dogs had the same escape response as they did when the predator was really there. Computer analysis has been able to break down some prairie dog calls into different components, suggesting the critters have yet another element of a real language.
5Tell your Norwegian friends what you think of this!
Perhaps 2005 will one day be remembered as the year that the great whales of the planet Earth finally lost whatever flimsy grip that had to survive into the future. Within the last three months, the ruling political parties of Norway, Japan, and (now) Korea have agreed among themselves to thumb their noses at the international laws for protection. Japan even plans to start taking endangered species.
- Norway's whaling season recently began with hunters allowed by the government to kill up to 797 of the mammals this year. This figure is up from 670 last year, even though whalers last year failed to meet their target, due to backlogs at processing factories. This is the largest quota allowed since Norway re-launched commercial whale hunting in 1993 in defiance of an International Whaling Commission moratorium in place since 1986.
- Japan is set to expand its annual whale hunt to take two new species. Under a new plan for what Tokyo calls its "research whaling program", Japan would take humpback whales and fin whales in addition to the four whale species it currently hunts. Japan abandoned commercial whaling in 1986 in line with an international ban, but began a program to hunt whales in what it calls scientific research whaling the following year. The meat ends up on store shelves and on the tables of gourmet restaurants. The new plan calls for Japan initially to hunt around 10 humpbacks and 10 fin whales per year, Kyodo said, and to sharply increase the number of minkes it takes each year. Japan last expanded its hunt in 2002, when it added sei whales to the list, setting off an international furor. It also takes sperm whales and Bryde's whales. A Fisheries Agency official said: "It has been recorded that the populations of the humpback and fin whales in the Antarctic are increasing. Nobody disputes this." Japanese officials had said they would continue whaling even if the plan was rejected at the IWC meeting in South Korea this summer.
- The Korean government is now subsidizing the construction of a huge new factory complex which will render whale meat into food for public consumption. Reviewing the building plans, observers conclude that this is the start of large-scale industrial whaling within a culture that has not hunted whales in many years.
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