The Miracle of Talking Birds
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Birds’ Sense of Hearing
For birds to display their talents in communicating by sound,
song and in the case of some birds, words, they require excellent
hearing. At critical times in their lives, their sense of hearing be-
comes particularly important. Experiments have shown that in or-
der for birds to learn their species’ song, they need an auditory feed-
back system. Thanks to this system, young birds learn to compare
the sounds they produce themselves with the patterns of a song they
have memorized. If they were deaf, it wouldn’t normally be possi-
ble for them to sing recognizable songs.
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Birds’ ears are well equipped for hearing, but they hear in a dif-
ferent way from us. For them to recognize a tune, they have to hear
it in always the same octave (a series of seven notes), whereas we
can recognize a tune even if we hear it in a different octave. Birds
cannot, but can instead recognize timbre—a fundamental note com-
bined with harmonies. The ability to recognize timbre and harmon-
ic variations lets birds hear and reply to many diverse sounds, and
sometimes even reproduce them.
Birds can also hear shorter notes than we can. Humans process
sounds in bytes in about 1/20th of a second
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, whereas birds can dis-
tinguish these sounds in 1/200th of a second, which means that
birds are superior at separating sounds that arrive in very rapid suc-
cession.
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In other words, a bird’s capacity to perceive sound is ap-
proximately ten times greater, and in every note heard by a human,
it can hear ten.
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Moreover, some birds are also able to hear lower
sounds than we are. Their hearing sensitivity is so finely tuned that
they can even tell the difference between pieces by such famous
composers as Bach and Stravinsky.
Birds’ extremely sensitive hearing functions perfectly. Clearly,
