What are the sparrows whistling from the rooftops?

In the 18th century, young songbirds were kept and melodies were played to them. They were supposed to memorize the tone sequences, "recordari" in Latin, and then whistle them. Recorders were often used for this instruction, which gave them their English name "recorder". There were even collections of melodies that recommended suitable tunes for different bird species.

This brings us to the subject of this publication, which sheds light on bird calls and songs, particularly at the interface with music. The author Christian Marti is an amateur musician himself and has collected material on the subject for over 20 years. You can feel this in every sentence of the 32 pages. Doors to broad ornithological fields of research and a rich musical repertoire are opened, and yet the text is pleasantly readable, one might almost say relaxing, which is perhaps due to the fact that it all begins on an early spring morning: Who starts singing when? And what is it actually for? Do only males sing? Why do we sometimes think in late summer that the birds have all disappeared? Birds don't have vocal chords. So how do they sing? What are calls, what are songs? Are starlings mocking us when they imitate sounds? Is a young cuckoo that makes as many begging sounds as the four-headed brood of its host family also fed four times over? How does birdsong change when there is constant ambient noise? And how is birdsong recorded at all?

More biological questions are being replaced by increasingly musical ones. It is about composers who have written bird calls into their works, about a kind of hit parade of the most frequently quoted species and also about bird calls on tape in the concert hall

The best thing is that all the bird calls and music examples mentioned are on the Website of the ornithological station to listen to! A really worthwhile thing - even the sparrows are whistling it from the rooftops.

Christian Marti with contributions by Gilberto Pasinelli, Vogelstimmen, (=Themen aus der Vogelwelt, Heft 70),
32 p., Fr. 5.00, Swiss Ornithological Institute Sempach 2013, info@vogelwarte.ch
The booklet is also available in French and Italian.