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