Is the Song Thrush a Physicist?

The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō bird has been calling me back to write. The last male of the species was last heard singing in 1987 with no female left to hear him. His song can be heard here.  I fear that his song and tragedy go unheard – that we don’t learn the lessons, not just of a species, but an entire family, the Mohoidae, also known as the Hawaiian Honeyeaters. I also recognise that the point of his song is that it is beautiful and deserved an answer. It deserved to be heard and passed to future generations. I feel afraid to use my own voice and that there will be no one who wants to hear it. I am frightened of claiming anything so grand about my voice or what I have to say. And I fear that I have nothing original or interesting to say, but I also worry that if I don’t use my voice to help to wake up the Forest, I will just be witness to a tragedy I did nothing to prevent.

My background is as a physicist and biologist, with a pretty hefty dose of mathematics for good measure. I am also an animist. What these threads have in common is a desire to experience directly rather than to rely purely on belief and teachings. They also open my eyes to see, through different lenses, the incredible beauty of our world, like the courting Great Spotted Woodpeckers who brushed past my head this morning, lost on this Spring Equinox to the pressing business of raising future generations. 

I have been heartened through the last of Winter by the Song Thrush on my doorstep, trying out triads of phrases to see which one will land. A voice that carries above the rest of the emerging dawn chorus. At times his voice is a backdrop to my ponderings and, at others, it is the meditation in itself. His song wove a melody through reflections on how we Humans view ourselves within the Universe. I started to ask myself are all physicists Human? And my answer to this question is no. The Song Thrush, with his anvil, used to solve the tricky problem of how to eat the Snail who evolved to protect Snailself with a shell, is also a physicist. I am intrigued by the question of how the way the Universe appears to us may be shaped by our physiology and our psychology.

I am fascinated by language and how it shapes and colours our perception. For example, modern English is structured around subjects and objects. Apparently, ancient English and more animist languages are more verb-based. A Plant is a being, Life expressing herself, not an object, but a happening. How we perceive our world and our Wild kin, how we treat them, is heavily influenced by language. I have written before about my refusal to refer to Wild kin as “it” – I prefer they and them or, ideally, a gender when it is known. It is the least we can do to stop treating our family as objects. (Robin Wall Kimmerer writes beautifully and especially on the subject of language and is a voice already waking up the Forest – certainly this little bird heard her call!) 

And language is just one part of our psychology. We observe the Universe and ourselves from within. We are an intrinsic part of what we observe and, as far as we know, we are not capable of observing from outside of these systems. We seem to project our experiences onto other beings and to measure what we observe of them by our own experience. This assumption is baked into the Drake equation, which looks at the probability of us encountering alien life. It assumes that these beings would be motivated to make contact with us and the risks that this might entail. I believe that our Human rumination on past and future is a prerequisite for such technology. Other beings seem much less concerned with this. Indeed, we do not know for sure how they experience time. The Song Thrush tells me that it is dawn and Spring is arriving. Maybe he has still more to teach us about time, but for now I am happy to have shared this moment with him.

 

Photo by Amee Fairbank-Brown on Unsplash