Bird vocalisation

Not to be confused with Birdsong (novel).

Bird vocalisation includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs (relatively complex vocalisations) are distinguished by function from calls (relatively simple vocalisations).

Quotes

• The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
  • Song of Solomon 2:12 (KJV)

• Spring, the sweete Spring, is the yeres pleasant King,
  Then bloomes eche thing, then maydes daunce in a ring,
  Cold doeth not sting, the pretty birds doe sing,
  Cuckow, jugge, jugge, pu we, to witta woo.
  The Palme and May make countrey houses gay,
  Lambs friske and play, the Shepherds pype all day,
  And we heare aye birds tune this merry lay,
  Cuckow, jugge, jugge, pu we, to witta woo.
  The fields breathe sweete, the dayzies kisse our feete,
  Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,
  In every streete, these tunes our eares doe greete,
  Cuckow, jugge, jugge, pu we, to witta woo
    Spring, the sweete Spring.
  • Thomas Nash, "Song", in Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600)

• The mounting lark (day’s herald) got on wing,
  Bidding each bird choose out his bough and sing.
  The lofty treble sung the little wren;
  Robin the mean, that best of all loves men;
  The nightingale the tenor, and the thrush
  The counter-tenor sweetly in a bush.
  And that the music might be full in parts,
  Birds from the groves flew with right willing hearts;
  But (as it seem’d) they thought (as do the swains,
  Which tune their pipes on sack’d Hibernia’s plains)
  There should some droning part be, therefore will’d
  Some bird to fly into a neighb’ring field,
  In embassy unto the King of Bees,
  To aid his partners on the flowers and trees
  Who, condescending, gladly flew along
  To bear the bass to his well-tuned song.
  The crow was willing they should be beholding
  For his deep voice, but being hoarse with scolding,
  He thus lends aid; upon an oak doth climb,
  And nodding with his head, so keepeth time.
  • William Browne, "A Concert of Birds", in Britannia's Pastorals, I (1613)

• A yellowhammer has just flown from a bare branch in the gateway, where he had been perched and singing a full hour. Presently he will commence again, and as the sun declines will sing him to the horizon, and then again sing till nearly dusk. The yellowhammer is almost the longest of all the singers; he sits and sits and has no inclination to move. In the spring he sings, in the summer he sings, and he continues when the last sheaves are being carried from the wheat field.
  • Richard Jefferies, "The Pageant of Summer". The Life of the Fields. Chatto & Windus. 1889. pp. 41–64.  (quote from p. 61; The Pageant of Summer was first published in the June 1883 issue of Longman's Magazine.)

• It’s not their fault they do not know
  The birdsong from the radio.
  • John Betjeman, "Slough", in Continual Dew (1937)

Procne and Philomela

• I grant the Linet, Larke, and Bul-finch sing,
  But best, the deare, good Angell of the Spring,
  The Nightingale.
  • Ben Jonson, adapting a fragment of Sappho, in The Sad Shepherd (1641), II, v

• All day I heard your high heart-broken laughter,
    Swallow, and, hearing, cried, ‘Is there no place
  Or time when you forget, Pandîon’s daughter,
    Your maidenhood, and Têreus, King of Thrace?’
  • Pamphilus, Anthologia Palatina, IX, 57 (tr. Humbert Wolfe)

• My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,
  And my complainings echo thro' the grove.
  • Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, 412–503 (tr. John Dryden)

• What Bird so sings, yet so dos wayle?
  O ’tis the ravish’d Nightingale.
  Jug, jug, jug, tereu, shee cryes,
  And still her woes at Midnight rise.
  Brave prick song! who is’t now we heare?
  None but the Larke so shrill and cleare;
  Now at heavens gats she claps her wings,
  The Morne not waking till shee sings.
  Heark, heark, with what a pretty throat
  Poore Robin red-breast tunes his note;
  Heark how the jolly Cuckoes sing
  Cuckoe, to welcome in the spring,
  Cuckoe, to welcome in the spring.
  • John Lyly, song from Alexander and Campaspe (1584), V, i

• Above the antique mantel was displayed
  As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
  The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
  So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
  Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
  And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
  “Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
  • T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)