An essay by David Rothenberg

This essay unravels an intriguing encounter between a human musician, a Blyth’s Reed Warbler, and a devoted bird sound enthusiast and animator in the early hours of the Estonian woods. Written recently by the philosopher, musician, artist and author David Rothenberg, this essay has never before been shared with the public, and we are thrilled to present it here as part of our collection, Winged Words – a nest for literary and creative works inspired by birds.

For decades, David Rothenberg has explored the joy of interspecies jamming with a variety of animals and birds, from whales and nightingales to cicadas and pond critters. David has also been an invaluable advisor for The Conference of the Birds. He came to Engeløya for the initial symposium in 2018, and also took part in the seminar Can People and Birds be Friends? at the Tromsø Centre for Contemporary Arts.

Tibutibuvihihehehiu

Live with the Blyth’s Reed Warbler

In Falling in Love with the Dark, the spiritual writer Clark Strand writes of the ‘wolf hour,’ that mysterious time between 1 and 3 am when people are least likely to be awake. In the forests of Estonia, a land that is no stranger to wolves, it turns out this is when one of the greatest of all bird songs can be most easily heard, from a singer who is hardly known, even by ornithologists.

I have written of Acrocephalus dumetorum, the Blyth’s reed warbler before. Years ago I had been told by the great record store owner Emu Lehtinen, of Digelius in Helsinki, that this would be the most jazzy bird to play along with, should I be lucky enough to run across one. While filming Nightingales in Berlin, in the middle of Finland (of course because it never gets dark up there in Spring) we came across a few of them jamming in the bushes. It nearly derailed our entire project, and I knew I had to get back to this species eventually.

In 2024 Tartu, Estonia was to be the Cultural Capital of Europe. They were organizing a “Bird Jam” event and asked me to appear to represent the nightingale, called Ööbik in Estonian. That’s because they sing “ööbik ööbik ööbik” among other sounds. Great name. The Blyth’s reed is æd-roolind, which means “garden reed bird” which is pretty boring. In other languages the dumetorum is called things like: buschrohrsänger, rousserolle des buissons, viitakerttunen, Šumski trstenjak, yabuyoshikiri, elrisöngvari, channarel da chaglia, or lăcar nordic. Most of these names seem inaccurate to the amazement of this critter. You can dig up such info instantly on Avibase and it shows the futility of humans’ attempts to name nature Reminds me of that meme where the pussycat is staring back at us and saying, “would you like to hear my name for you?”.

Geoff Sample, Britain’s expert on European warblers (nothing to do with American warblers) agreed that such an amazing bird should not be named after a human, even so distinguished a naturalist as Edward Blyth, who almost came up with the idea of natural selection. He once wrote essays under the pseudonym “Zoophilus” and ended his days in an insane asylum. Did the birds drive him to it?

Sample and I thought we could rename our bird sisichak, because he made jazzy, scat- like sounds of that nature. But no one was yet ready to kick Blyth’s title off his bird. Not yet at least, though that is happening in America, not Europe, so far, taking all human names off or birds.

Would you like to hear my name for you?

Anyway, the Estonians assembled for that Bird Jam, including Tallinn-famous poets, Estonian Eurovision stars, folk musicians, and actors, wouldn’t kick me off my nightingale position, so I still had to represent that more famous bird in Tartu. But that wasn’t going to stop me from seeking out the yabuyoshikiri on my own. Who could take me to this ultimate jazz bird that I’d only heard once before? I blindly surfed the web, and came across this: https://www.youtube.com/@FlackoWeasel

I asked some Estonian bird experts if they had ever heard of Flacko Weasel. No they had not. They were shocked to come across this web page. I was shocked that any bird lovers had failed to come across it before. Guess they were mainly out watching birds and not wasting time on the internet like me.

An entire YouTube channel mostly devoted to cartoon-like animations of the sounds of the Blyth’s reed warbler, turned into a jazzy scatlike language all her own. Each individual bird has been given its own name. Here, for example, is Triido, “best moments”: Nii dee vüi tisi tis bjapp bjap. Muarti vap kideo kideo. Nii dis võ wap wapii Nii dis võ wap wap. Värr Trrrrrrrr Iido värr värr värr Trrrrrrrrr iido duk duk duk duk. Ill niduvat psiu psiu, Ill niduvat psiu psiu. Tk tk tseika prrrriido vope vurrpidi kata vurrpidi….. and this is just three minutes of a song that could go on for three hours!

This collection of cartoon videos covers more than twenty-five of these individually named birds. All have names way better than “Blyth” for a crazily musical bird. Who was it who had devoted so much time to creatively describing the wild music this species could sing?

I asked some Estonian bird experts if they had ever heard of Flacko Weasel. No they had not. They were shocked to come across this web page. I was shocked that any bird lovers had failed to come across it before. Guess they were mainly out watching birds and not wasting time on the internet like me.

Who is Flacko Weasel? I wrote to find out. A character made up online, inspired by Scrat from the movie Ice Age, was originally going to be Wacko but that seemed too leading. Who are you really? I asked. Does that matter, they wrote back. I guess not. We shared our enthusiasm for this crazy bird for many months online. I sent my film, my recordings, told how I like to play live with birds. Could I come visit and would they show me the birds?

No way, Flacko said. I’m not so good with people. I’m more an online person. Come on, I said. Don’t you want to help someone who also loves your bird? Well, I guess you can come. But you can’t stay here! Doesn’t matter, I said. There are five AirBnbs ten minutes from your town. “Really?” they acted surprised. “Are they nice?”

So I flew across the ocean to see a Weasel about a Bird.

Her real name is Merlyn Kotljar, and she describes her dedication to the groovy songs of the æd-roolind to be a consequence of being born with some unexpected challenges. She just thinks a bit differently from everyone else, and finding that too many people made fun of her in the capital city of Tallinn, Merlyn moved to a small countryside town where life was cheaper and with less stress. One spring night she heard a bird she had never heard before in the city, and she wanted to know more. At the social services center in town she mends clothes and sews furry suits which she sometimes wears to Furry conventions. “I have a lot of anxiety,” she is fond of saying. “These costumes help.” I know plenty of people with a lot of anxiety, but most do not realize it and don’t know how to deal with it. Merlyn really seems to have found a way to cope. And part of it involves meticulously transcribing these bird songs in a playful, cartoon style.

I have to laugh because this approach is so different from the sometimes off-putting diagrams and sonograms of more ‘serious’ bioacousticians and zoomusicologists. Merlyn’s cartoon versions get a much better response than what the scientists and musicians produce. If the goal is to best communicate the daring and beauty of immensely complex bird songs, then she is probably doing a better job.

We need to stay up late to be ready for our birds, since the prime singing happens between 1 and 3 am, after the nightingales quiet down and before dawn brings all the other species to sound. We are pretty far North here in Estonia saw dawn is awfully early. We wander the dark meadows trying not to excite too many barking dogs. We want to get as close as possible to these invisible birds without spooking them. We set up of our recorders and back off, content to listen at a good distance, because they are still so loud.

“What are you listening for?” I ask Merlyn.

“I need to get down all their amazing beats,” she smiles. “I need to wait until they make me want to dance.”

I have slightly different goals, since I want to play along. She’s dancing, and I’m trying to interact. Mostly our goals align, but she needs to have at least an hour of each bird singing alone, unencumbered, for her records and transcribing process. Since they can sing for up to three hours at a time, there is room enough for both approaches. As long as I can stay awake. She’s far more tireless than I, that’s for sure.

What is so special about this bird? I’ll let Merlyn aka Flacko describe it. I said I wanted to interview her, then I asked one question, and she talked for an hour straight without stopping:

They are capable of interesting rhythmic parts, they can keep a tempo like ta ta ta Teh duh, ta ta ta Teh duh Sometimes they go into the loop and they start to make like these beats and then these rhythmic parts. Then they might try something else, like deh deh Dee dah, deh deh Dee dah. It almost pops my head it’s so cool. Then they like to do a lot of the Liido, si si kleh and all these interesting parts. The viido is their distinctive sound. Like thrush it’s vip vip vipoh and for Blyth’s reed warblers it’s Liido, liido. No other bird in Estonia does that….

When I name them I remember each individual one much better than if I just numbered them one, two and three.. This one is named Riisve because he did this sound Riisve Riisve, and also the roller coaster part, woodleeah, woodleah, and this one I named Scorch because he was next to the firehouse. This is the first year where I recognized a bird from last year. I always wanted this to happen, because it means after he migrated to Africa he came back to exactly this same place. This was the year it happened. It was like “hey, I know this part, I know that part,” so I know who you are. It was awesome!

When you have found your bird, you will know, and it can become a totem animal for listener and player alike. Why, you might ask, would a bird sing this much? Darwin and Richard Prum would say it’s an example of extreme sexual selection, when the females prefer, generation after generation, a mate with more diverse and more complex songs. All the Euro-warblers do this, from the most-studied sedge warbler to the loudest great reed warbler to the magical marsh warbler who spews out hundreds of African bird songs that he’s picked up over his winter migration, they all have the potential to delight and surprise.

So what is it that is so special about the viitakerttunen? You could say it’s the humor of the song, the up-and-down of it, the question-mark quality that makes you go “huh?” and wonder what’s gonna come next.

They are capable of interesting rhythmic parts, they can keep a tempo like ta ta ta Teh duh, ta ta ta Teh duh Sometimes they go into the loop and they start to make like these beats and then these rhythmic parts. Then they might try something else, like deh deh Dee dah, deh deh Dee dah. It almost pops my head it’s so cool. Then they like to do a lot of the Liido, si si kleh and all these interesting parts. The viido is their distinctive sound. Like thrush it’s vip vip vipoh and for Blyth’s reed warblers it’s Liido, liido. No other bird in Estonia does that….

For me this journey was a rare chance to delve into extremely detailed interspecies music. Just the two of us listening to one special bird whom nothing can make stop. I tried different wind instrument to play along with him, first tentatively, with many silences, mostly space, then interactively, trying together to make something that only the particular night and place could make possible.

In the first encounter I play tiny world flutes, a furulya that plays two tones at once, a whistle from Bulgaria. I played these double notes, a second apart over a single bird singing over distant planes and trains, as a light rain gradually grows around us. You have to wait seven minutes of solo bird before I come in, and maybe you hear that the bird quizzically realizes I am there and changes his timing.

In the second encounter, there is almost no background noise. A different bird, just up the road from the first, sings for five minutes before I join. He’s offering up his own sense of
rhythm, and I got to hear him as music first before I can do anything. Playing along helps me enter his world. I play along for eleven minutes, as I’ve lost track of time. Or actually I’ve gained track of a new kind of time. The backbeat of this new bird’s way, a genre only he can truly know.

In the third encounter, the longest, I’m playing various electronic interventions, using an iPad, that can go in so so many directions… Although some would consider waving a screen in the air in the middle of the night a kind of techno-sacrilege in the midst of one of nature’s most amazing avian performances, somehow I do it anyway. The yabuyoshikiri sounds electronic enough on his own. Our acoustic instruments pale along with it so why not challenge him with an armada of inexplicable synthesized sounds. He certainly seems to like them. It’s as if each complementary sound challenges the bird to wonder… Where am I? Who am I? Why indeed do I need to sing for three hours in the middle of the night when no one might be listening?

Not true my friend. We two humans are listening. One dances and draws while the other joins in with the song. We have no right to be there, says the song-in-itself. Or does it say anything at all aside from its special one-of-a-kind music? I am learning from Merlyn to feel so much for this bird. What more can a person do than bear witness to the beauties of nature that resound endlessly upon us? I ask too many question, humans tend to ask too many questions that no other creature has any impetus to do. Justin Gregg in If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal says that the one thing that distinguishes humans from all other species is our tendency to moral outrage; he means, say, that homosexuality is common in the animal world but no other species gets upset about it, saying things like “I’m shocked,” or “you have disgraced this community.” They just let everyone be themselves.

But maybe what singles us out is our need to wonder, to ask, to be perplexed at the vast beauty we live with. Science begins with questions, art too begins with questions. One answers with the collation of data sifted into diagrams and numbers, while the other answers with moments of amazement we shouldn’t want to explain. I can measure what the sisichak can do but no analysis could ever encompass the magic of his song. I may try to play along with him but his music doesn’t need me. That indifference could incur sadness but I’ll play along anyway, until I am surprised by duets and turnarounds that make me smile.

Here, in this Spectralayers image that pits sustained white-orange clarinet sounds against the blue live warbler, we have either an impressionistic chiaroscuro of synesthetic color standing in for sound, either that or an exact measurement by a program trying to split a complex duet into its inherent birds vs human parts. Looking at this helps me make sense of what’s going on but I don’t really want to turn the music into data. I want to aim for a music no one animal could make alone, reaching for a song between two species that would not know what to say to each other even if we could.

Invented words fail. Language struggles. Only in music can we inhabit the world of another species’ music. And it’s not so hard, because no one even knows what human music really means. You have to be with it—playing, listening, dancing, feeling—to grasp its power. The beats of the Blyth’s reed start out sounding unfamiliar, but after an hour or two hearing even your first song you too will feel the pulse, and won’t be able to sit still. The moon rises and we dance to the bird tune in the dark on a dusty road. A sports car zooms down the road and screeches to a halt. “What in hell’s name are you doing here?” shouts its occupant. “We’re from Võidula. In Võidula we do not leave people stranded at night on a road.”

“We’re listening for birds,” says Merlyn calmly, no hint of anxiety. “This is the time when they sing.”

And this is the time of our listening, the age when nature is rapidly dying and we need to do our best to slow down this death. We start by closely noticing what is still here, and gently find the finest human way to join in, so that this beautiful, eternal song opens up to us instead of shutting us out.

Even after playing for hours, days, weeks, I still have no idea what it means. But I’m starting to feel it, and that feeling won’t quit. Tibutibuvihihehehiu!

BIBLIOGRAPHY [not strictly necessary, but perhaps helpful]

Justin Gregg, (New York: Little, Brown, 2022).
I.M. Marova, V.V. Ivanitskii & O.D. Veprintseva. Individual, population, and geographic

differentiation in advertising song of the Blyth’s reed warbler, Acrocephalus dumetorum (Sylvidae). Biol Bull Russ Acad Sci 37, 846–860 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1134/S106235901008008X

Richard Prum, The Evolution of Beauty (New York: Doubleday, 2017).
David Rothenberg, Nightingales in Berlin, (University of Chicago Press, 2019).
Veronika Samotskaya, Irina Marova, Pavel Kvartalnov, Vladimir Yu. Arkhipov & Vladimir

Ivanitskii (2016) Song in two cryptic species: comparative analysis of Large-billed Reed Warblers Acrocephalus orinus and Blyth’s Reed Warblers Acrocephalus dumetorum, Bird Study, 63:4, 479-489, DOI: 10.1080/00063657.2016.1220489

Clark Strand, Waking up to the Dark, (New York: Random House, 2015).

BirdJam Tartu 2024 streaming here: https://uttv.ee/naita?id=35624
Flacko Weasel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FlackoWeasel/videos David Rothenberg duetting with a Blyth’s reed warbler: https://soundcloud.com/user- 828525518/duet-with-blyths-reed-warbler

Tibutibuvihihehehiu_David_Rothenberg