Stap's lucid prose distills the complexities of the study of birdsong and unveils a remarkable discovery that sheds light on the mystery of mysteries: why young birds in the suborder oscines -- the "true songbirds" -- learn their songs but the closely related suboscines are born with their songs genetically encoded. As the story unfolds, Stap contemplates our enduring fascination with birdsong, from ancient pictographs and early Greek soothsayers, who knew that bird calls represented the voices of the gods, to the story of Mozart's pet starling.

In a modern, noisy world, it is increasingly difficult to hear those voices of the gods. Exploring birdsong takes us to that rare place -- in danger of disappearing forever -- where one hears only the planet's oldest music.< "Birdsong is a wonderful journey through the science, history, and biology of how and why birds sing. We highly recommend it for all bird lovers, nature lovers, and science enthusiasts."

-- Don and Lillian Stokes, authors of Stokes Field Guide to Birds

< "These birds are a perfect example of the complex learning that goes on in the natural world and the fact that animals group together to form their own culture. I thank Don Stap for taking me into the field with him and helping me see. I was completely fascinated."

-- Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation

< "This is an authoritative and intriguing book about one of the great wonders and mysteries of nature. I read it with fascination and great pleasure."

-- Tracy Kidder, author of House and Mountains Beyond Mountains

< "Popular yet thorough, shimmering with the romance of an arcane field."

-- Kirkus Reviews

< "A lucidly written combination of scientific lore and vivid reportage, the book is a thoughtful treatment of one of nature's most beguiling phenomena."

-- Publishers Weekly

<

Chapter One

Several years ago on a Sunday afternoon I wandered through the one-story cinder-block building at one of the most famous addresses in bird studies -- 159 Sapsucker Woods Road: Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology. I had been let in, the door locked behind me, and I had the place to myself. To research an article I was writing on birdsong, I planned to review some of the literature in the lab's private library, including materials that were available nowhere else, but within minutes I found myself drawn to another kind of archive. Passing through an unlit hallway hung with the paintings of Louis Agassiz Fuertes, the greatest of bird artists, and an early associate of the lab, I made my way to the southeast wing of the building and opened the gray metal door to Room 125. Stepping inside, I felt a rush of cool, dry air. The windowless room, tightly packed with rows of metal shelves, was austere: white walls, a cement floor, exposed ductwork and girders, and bare lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling. It had the sterile functionality of a hospital room, and it appeared, if anything, cleaner and more orderly. The only sound was air moving through the vents. It would have been difficult to imagine a more lifeless space, yet all around me, stored on wall-to-wall shelves, was the aural life of the planet. This was the archive of the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds, the largest collection of its kind in the world. The shelves, which rose above my head, contained more than 130,000 individual recordings, some in neatly labeled boxes containing seven-inch reels of tape, others on standard cassettes in makeshift containers with hand-scribbled labels.

Walking down the narrow aisles, I found boxes that held the sounds of crickets chirping, mountain gorillas thumping their chests, triggerfish squirting water, and prairie dogs barking. It was birdsong, though, that had drawn me there, and birdsong that dominated the Library of Natural Sounds. There, arranged taxonomically from ostrich to raven, were the songs of nearly six thousand of the world's nine thousand or so species of birds. On one shelf were the babbling-brook arias of mockingbirds, on another the flutelike ee-oo-lays of wood thrushes, and on others the w Read Less