My mother talked to the birds. She’d stand under the Jonathan apple tree in our Missouri back yard and whistle up a cardinal or a yellow warbler or a black-capped chickadee, just by changing the melody and timbre of her whistle. “But what are you saying to them?” I’d ask as the birds tipped their heads quizzically from the perches in the tree.
“I’m just telling them hello,” she’d answer. “Letting them know they’re safe.”
Which they weren’t, always, given our cat, whose mouth she would sometimes force open to let an unwary and miraculously unhurt bird fly out.
Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are suggesting, not that Mom could really communicate with the birds, but that the language she used in her other verbal communications could have evolved from, or be related to, birdsong.
It’s a lovely idea, but less because of the…