![]() No matter how the starling learned the song, on May 27, 1784, it spat that tune right back at the tunesmith-but not without taking some liberties first. Or perhaps Mozart himself had been in a few times and had whistled his line enough for the bird to imprint it. Mozart’s melody riffs in G on a simple line heard in many a volkslied, so the starling might have been hearing similar tunes from other shoppers that whole month. So what kind of murmur began that spring day in Vienna when a twenty-eight-year-old Mozart, jaunty in his garnet coat and gold-rimmed cap, strolled into a shop to whistle at a starling in a cage? That bird must have zeroed in on Mozart’s mouth, drinking-in the whistled seventeen-note opening phrase from his recent piano concerto: This sonic sense of the tribal might explain why, when we see a trilling cloud of 10,000 starlings-each bird watching its seven closest neighbors for the slightest change of speed or angle, dodging hawks en masse with shrieks and chips, beak beats and hard whistles-we find ourselves calling that group not a flock or a swarm or a drove, but a collective noun that’s drenched in sound: a murmuration. A wizened starling finds his place in the mob by singing long runs of mashed-up noise that prove his vast experience. A young starling sends mad chatter to her close-by kin to feel where the safe world starts and stops. The male starling sings his long coupling song to his mate while she pecks for food. There are many in a starling’s life: the little tribe of the monogamous pair, that of the clutch family, the flock in the field, the mob coming home from the neighboring fields to roost together overnight. ![]() We’re not sure why starlings engage in such behavior, but we think it’s because this breed is hardwired to sing to its tribes. This will then be repeated with the maddening obsessiveness of an electronica concert. TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE ONE PLUSYou’ll hear Mozart, your own voice, the white noise of the house you live in, plus the recesses of starling instinct: TWINK-LE-bizeeet!-TWINK-“hi! how are you!”- chackerchackerchackerchacker-LIT-TLE-bweet! bweet! Purrrup!-LIT-TLE- LIT-“hi! how are you”-TLE, TWIN-KLE, LIT-TLE- STAAAAAAR! The “Queen of the Night” aria sung in a screech worthy of a Bee Gee.Ī few days after that, your line of Mozart will come from the birdcage as a barely recognizable string of filched sounds, all sung together in a line so arrhythmic it’s catchy. And when it does spit back whatever Mozart you’ve fed it, it will be on a starling’s zany terms: a theme from the “Haffner” Symphony punctuated with guttural warbles, or the famous Adagio from his Clarinet Concerto mixed into an uncanny interpretation of your dishwasher. You’ll have to come back whistling for a day or a week, confirming the sound’s place in the world where the bird perches. Do not expect that when you whistle “Twinkle, twinkle” you’ll hear a “little star” immediately in return. Note how it nods along with your tuneful body as if to say, Yes, yes, I have it.īut a starling is no parrot. ![]() ![]() ![]() Though a caged starling is chatty during the day and downright garrulous at night, the moment it locks in on your Mozartean whistle the little bird will only blink, aiming its entire soundless self toward the music coming from you. It might bob its dark head back and forth at the line you’ve sent out-the dotted pops of “Papagena, Papageno” or the crystalline shards of the Adagio and Rondo for Glass Harmonica. It will arch its starling neck, bending toward your puckered lips. If it knows humans as creatures that sing and are sung to, the bird will shut its beak. Whistle a little Mozart to a starling in a cage. ![]()
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