Evening Chorus

This is no scale of notes or some harmonic musing made up by a lofty musician hoping to handle a few dollars and a free drink. This is the chart topping tune keeping the world rolling along millennia after millennia as civilizations come and go, and all the world's composers scribble themselves to death in the blink of an eye. The language of the birds has long been a topic for anecdote and speculation. That calls have meanings that are interpreted by their listeners has been well demonstrated. Domestic chickens have distinctive alarm calls for aerial and ground predators, and they respond to these alarm calls appropriately. However a language has, in addition to words, structures and rules. Studies to demonstrate the existence of language have been difficult due to the range of possible interpretations. Research on parrots by Irene Pepperberg is claimed to demonstrate the innate ability for grammatical structures, including the existence of concepts such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. Studies on starling vocalizations have also suggested that they may have recursive structures. In modern-day biology, bird song is typically analysed using acoustic spectroscopy. Species vary greatly in the complexity of their songs and in the number of distinct kinds of song they sing (up to 3000 in the Brown Thrasher); in some species, individuals vary in the same way. In a few species such as starlings and mockingbirds, songs imbed arbitrary elements learned in the individual's lifetime, a form of mimicry. This sound uses the following file from Freesound: http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=118935