Steve Schwartz asks:

>The question for me is: Do birds sing just for the hell of it?

I'm going out on a limb ...a feeble, leafy treelimb.

I once half awoke just before dawn in Fulham, London, to some bird singing
I'd never experienced before, or since.  It was still dark when it began
with one bird, the early riser, singing a note, maybe two.  It repeated
this, and did so again, and after a few times a reply finally came from a
bird (annoyed?) on another branch.  The initial call was repeated, and came
again and insisted, and then the reply returned, and gradually a pattern
was established:  call, repeat, call, repeat.

In due course, a third voice from a tree across the street broke into the
duet, having found a place for its trill.  The others carried on as before,
and it fit in its trill again.  This thickened the pattern:  call, repeat,
call, trill, call, repeat, call, trill, call, etc.  Once the three-bird
pattern was set and played out a few times, yet another bird from a distant
tree found a spot:  call, repeat, tweet, call, trill, tweet, call, repeat,
tweet, call, trill, call, etc.

My feeling was that, as with roosters, this was awakening the other
birds, and this listener, to the now rising sun; who knows? More than
this, though, the singing had a striking symmetry:  an intricate order
or ensemble playing was clearly there -- and, putting it mildly, the whole
had considerable beauty.  There were dominant melodic activities, secondary
adornments, and clear patterns were held throughout.  While half awake, I
was even able to keep my grasp of its structure:  like music, it had
significant predictability.

And yet it was just a matter of time until the number of bird-calls grew
to be too large to trace its intricate patterns:  for me to retain my grip,
or to participate by anticipating, with some success, the coming sounds
...as we can often do with music.  My mind eventually passed through the
threshold of sleep to a state closer to wakefulness, and around then, when
the sun was fully up, through no fault of its own the chorus began falling
apart, conforming to ordinary notions of a bunch of birds in the trees
singing chaotically, with little concern for what the others were up to.

Whatever these birds were doing -- singing 'Hi, here I am,' 'Check out
that sun, streaming over the trees!', or 'Wanna make eggs?' -- I strongly
felt music-making in progress:  if I'm right that music involves some
deliberateness or effort to convey patterns through sound, to devise sound
'shapes;' and that it involves performers who must keep their places and
have regard for the whole, or take care not disrupt the overall pattern.

The birds were doing all of these.  I say this with the same kind of
unprovable and, yes, indefinable conviction I feel in asserting that I've
seen dogs smile, cats look at me with anger, and other animals visibly
saddened by the abrupt death of their relatives by some hunter.

'Dawn chorus' is a term I think I've heard used with reference to this
kind of experience.  I link this experience -- no dream though it's never
happened to me since -- with the question as to whether birdsong is music,
or just random noisemaking by beings incapable of sufficiently complex
awareness as to contrive such creations.

So:  Do birds sing just for the hell of it? Well, it would seem:  yes.
If some were interested in 'multiplication,' as Bobby Darin puts it, that
was or became subordinate to the collective act, and was not its purpose.
Yet the group singing was not chaotic, but seemed to be an end in itself.

To me, that makes it a 'for-the-hell-of-it' kind of thing.  My guess is
that this is an indicator that it's music, not just utterance in a void,
or even idle chirping.

Bert Bailey, in Ottawa