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This chapter reveals bird song as the classic case where individual animals learn their behaviour from others, usually young birds from adults, so that particular songs are passed on from one individual to another through cultural transmission. This chapter outlines the sorts of changes that may take place, at the level of elements, song types and repertoires, and also several distinct ways in which novel songs may arise in a population (immigration, innovation, invention, and improvisation). Much of the evidence is that such changes are random, and that their consequences are either neutral or negative, but some cases have been described where there have been progressive changes in song within a population. These are likely to stem from individuals adapting their songs to match a changing physical or social environment. The individual that generates variety and stands out from the crowd may also benefit through sexual selection, with a tension between innovation and conformity.

Many of Stevens’s most important poems feature birds, and specifically the phenomenon of the poet hearing birds’ songs. The bird/bard tradition is, of course, a long one in the poetic canon. Both bird and bard sing, and both carry messages from another domain, either above or below the mundane world of human affairs. In Stevens’s poetry, however, the connection between bird and bard is presented as anything but “natural,” as the bird poems relentlessly foreground the performativity and rhetoricity of the poet’s reaction to hearing birds’ songs and his speculation about its meaning. Far from mitigating against an ecopoetic reading of the poems, however, this feature in fact secures it. Drawing on Diane Ackerman’s book The Genius of Birds and Jacques Derrida’s critique of “responding” versus merely “reacting” as the hallmark of the human’s difference from the animal, this chapter shows that performativity, iterability, and a complicated—and finally undecidable—co-implication of responding and reacting, improvisation and instinct, are constitutive of birds’ songs in the current ornithological understanding. Here as in earlier chapters, form provides the ecologically shared conditions of possibility for meaning for both humans and animals, linking the human to the non-human world in systematic, not representational, ways.

This chapter, which is concerned with bird song, addresses the versatility of sounds that can be learned, learning accuracy, and functional flexibility of vocalizations in a variety of species. The origins of learning in birds are discussed. The chapter also reviews the accuracy of song learning and theories as to why birds learn accurately. It demonstrates that some species of songbirds react differently when singers produce an accurate imitation of a song type which they themselves have learned. The chapter suggests that songbirds use the great variation in their songs to communicate subtly different messages about the identity of the singer.

One consequence of urbanization is the massive level of anthropogenic noise that animals have to cope with. Because birds use acoustic signals to communicate vital information, the masking of their vocalizations has potentially major effects on their fitness. This chapter explores the difficulties of acoustic communication in the urban habitat, the different solutions that birds may use to circumvent them, and the possible consequences this may have for sexual selection and speciation. The adverse effects of anthropogenic noise on birds, such as stress or hearing damage, are all related to masking of acoustic signals and other important biological sounds.

In this chapter the diverse mating systems exhibited by birds are described and explained. The chapter begins with a discussion of anisogamy and resulting behavioural differences exhibited by male and female birds. Sperm competition, sperm storage, and delayed fertilization are discussed and their consequences in terms of reproductive behaviours and systems are explained. Courtship systems and behaviours are discussed. Social monogamy, polygamy, and lekking behaviour are examined and examples of field research are given to support offered hypotheses. Bird song is considered in some detail through discussion of the function of song and of the genetic, neurological, and physiological control of singing. Particular attention is given to the impact of noise pollution on singing behaviour. The chapter concludes with a discussion of chick rearing including brood size management.

This chapter details the author's experience listening to birds an hour or two before the dawn during a cross-country ride. As the author crossed the Big Hole River, a lone marsh wren sang lazily. It was a western marsh wren, with all of the harsh buzzes and rattles and whistles one would expect from its more than one hundred different songs, so different from the eastern marsh wren the author heard on the other side of the Great Plains. Yellow warblers race among a dozen or so different songs, filling all air time between songs with frenetic chipping. The author also listened to northern waterthrushes.

My final chapter returns to Descartes and to his obsession with automated animal life, and meditates on the status of a bird song, its repetitions and variations, its territoriality, seduction or creativity, whether heard in its natural environment or as a recorded chip in a baby’s toy bird.

Silvereyes (Zosterops lateralis) are native Australian birds that thrive in both cities and rural areas. Their diverse repertoire of songs and calls overlap with the frequency range of urban noise. This chapter examines the silvereye to determine the various aspects of urban vocal adjustment, and to test some hypotheses on urban acoustic adaptation. It asks the following questions: Do songs and calls differ between rural and urban silvereye populations? Are any differences potentially adaptive? What evidence is there of signal flexibility? Are any vocalization changes accompanied by morphological or genetic changes? The chapter also looks into the potential mechanisms and consequences of any adaptations or differences between city and rural birds. It presents a case study comparing the morphology, genotypes, songs, alarm calls, and contact calls of seven urban populations with seven rural populations of silvereyes across 1 million kilometres of eastern Australia.

‘Certain Trees’ concludes Avant-Folk by reflecting on the socio-creative implications of distribution within the small press networks examined in the previous chapters. Returning to Lorine Niedecker, the book’s Coda discusses an exhibition organised by Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn, Certain Trees, that tacitly reaffirms the extended legacy of Niedecker and Jargon Society within the broader small press milieu covered in Avant-Folk. ‘Certain Trees’ also finds an apposite analogy for the ‘happy distribution’ of small press publications in John Bevis’s artists’ books on bird song and answers the questions initially raised in the introduction regarding the possibility of a remote, ‘elsewhere community’ of poets that remain united through amity, collaboration, and the complex infrastructures of small press networks.

This chapter discusses Carolyn Rodgers’s poetic works in her poetry collections, including Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969). It explains that Rodgers’ poetry showed that the concept of Black Art was not a “fixed” one, but rather, something that varies and changes its form, function, and meaning with each piece of work produced by African American artists. In her first poetic works, Rodgers pointed out that the goal of defining the role of the Black Arts writer continued to be an essential preoccupation for self-acclaimed Black Arts Movement participants, as the movement wanted writers to position themselves within unwavering spaces of political expression and cultural representation.

The chapters in this volume share the theme that our understanding of pattern, process, and consequence in the study of behavioral evolution can be advanced by examining differences among conspecific populations. Traditionally, biologists have sought such understanding by comparing different species. Although differences among species are usually greater than differences among conspecific populations, so many factors can vary interspecifically that determining selection pressures driving behavioral divergence may be difficult. As Arnold (1992) has argued, confounding variables often are less prevalent in intraspecific studies; in addition, relatively small evolutionary changes may be perceptible. From a historical perspective, there appear to be good reasons for believing that sexual behavior should show little variation among conspecific populations. First, early species concepts largely were typological, and accorded intraspecific variation with no reality, let alone importance (Mayr 1976). Partially due to such thinking, early ethologists argued that certain behavior patterns should be largely invariant. For Lorenz (1970), courtship behavior was a prime example of such a “fixed action pattern” (or FAP), a predictable and stereotyped sequence of actions that was elicited by a specific releasing stimulus. Later work revealed that such sequences are more variable than once thought, leading to the suggestion that the FAP be replaced by the MAP, or “modal action pattern.” This stresses the average or modal nature of much behavior (Barlow 1977). The second reason for expecting little intraspecific variation in sexual behavior derives in part from the modern synthesis. The “founding fathers” of modern evolutionary biology placed great emphasis on the role of species differences in preventing interspecific mating and wastage of reproductive effort in the production of unfit hybrid offspring (e.g., Dobzhansky 1937). Indeed, Tinbergen (1953) stated that one of the functions of mating behavior is to ensure such reproductive isolation among species. Presumably, selection would strongly favor the production of unambiguous signals, leading to invariance. The earliest evidence demonstrating the existence of intraspecific variation in sexual behavior patterns came from studies that were firmly rooted in concepts that characterized the early stages of the modern synthesis.