Copyright

Copyright © 2017 by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Cover design by Julianna Lee
Cover art by Mary Evans / Natural History Museum
Author photograph by Tom Furtwangler
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ISBN 978-0-316-37087-5

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 CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph

PRELUDE A Plague of Inspiration

ONE The Starling of Seattle
TWO Mozart and the Musical Thief
THREE Uninvited Guest, Unexpected Wonder
FOUR What the Starling Said
FIVE The Starling of Vienna
SIX How the Starling Knew
SEVEN Chomsky’s Starling
INTERLUDE The Heart of Time for Birds and Mozart
EIGHT Birds of a Feather
NINE Mozart’s Ear and the Music of the Spheres
FINALE Three Funerals and a Flight of Fancy
Coda

Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Bibliography
Newsletters
For Ginny

—who brings music to our

lives
It does seem hard that our earth may be a far better place than we
have yet discovered, and that peace and content may be only
round the corner, yet that somehow our song of praise is
prevented, or does not go well with Hesperus, unlike that of a silly
bird.
—H. M. Tomlinson, The Face of the Earth
 Prelude

A PLAGUE OF INSPIRATION

This book would have taken me half as long to write if it were not for
one fact: most of it was composed with a starling perched on my
shoulder. Or at least in the vicinity of my shoulder. Sometimes she was
standing on top of my head. Sometimes she was nudging the tips of my
fingers as they attempted to tap the computer keys. Sometimes she was
defoliating the Post-it notes from books where I had carefully placed
them to mark passages essential to the chapter I was working on—she
would stand there in a cloud of tiny pink and yellow papers with an
expression on her intelligent face that I could only read as pleased. She
pooped on my screen. She pooped in my hair. Sometimes she would
watch, with me, the chickadees that came to my window feeder to nibble
the sunflower seeds I left for them. Sometimes she would look me in the
eye and say, Hi, honey! Clear as day. “Hi, Carmen,” I would whisper
back to her. Sometimes, tired of all these things and seemingly unable to
come up with a new way to entertain herself or pester me, she would
stand close to my neck, tunnel beneath my hair, and nestle down,
covering her warm little feet with her soft breast feathers, so close to my
ear that I could hear her heartbeat. She would close her eyes and fall into
a light bird sleep.
It sounds like a sweet scene, but there is a conflict at its center. I am a
nature writer, a birdwatcher, and a committed wildlife advocate, so the
fact that I have lovingly raised a European starling in my living room is
something of a confession. In conservation circles, starlings are easily
the most despised birds in all of North America, and with good reason.
They are a ubiquitous, nonnative, invasive species that feasts insatiably
upon agricultural crops, invades sensitive habitats, outcompetes native
birds for food and nest sites, and creates way too much poop. Millions of
starlings have spread across the continent since they were introduced
from England into New York’s Central Park one hundred and thirty years
ago.
An adult starling is about eight and a half inches from tip to tail, a fair
bit larger than a sparrow but still smaller than a robin, with iridescent
black feathers and a long, sharp, pointed bill. Just over a hundred and
fifty years before the first starlings appeared in Central Park, the Swedish
botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus had placed the species within his
emerging avian taxonomy and christened it with the Latinized name we
still use: Sturnus vulgaris. Sturnus for “star,” referring to the shape of the
bird in flight, with its pointed wings, bill, and tail; and vulgaris, not for
“vulgar,” as starling detractors like to assume, but for “common.”* When
Linnaeus named the bird, it was simply part of the European landscape
and had not spread across the waters. There was no controversy
surrounding the species; it was just a pretty bird. Starlings are now one
of the most pervasive birds in North America, and there are so many that
no one can count them; estimates run to about two hundred million.
Ecologically, their presence here lies on a scale somewhere between
highly unfortunate and utterly disastrous.
In The Birdist’s Rules of Birding, a National Audubon Society blog by
environmental journalist Nicholas Lund, one of the primary rules is
actually “It’s Okay to Hate Starlings.” Sometimes beginning birders in
the first flush of bird-love believe that it is a requirement of their
newfound vocation to be enamored of all feathered creatures. But as we
learn more, writes Lund, our relationships with various species become
more nuanced. Some species are universally loved; who wouldn’t feel
happy in the presence of a cheerful black-capped chickadee? But once
we become more informed about starlings, we begin to feel an inner
dissonance. Lund tells birders who are first experiencing such confusion
not to feel guilty: “It’s okay to hate certain species… healthy, even. I
suggest you start with European Starlings.” In addition to the issues with
starlings I’ve listed, Lund adds: “They’re loud and annoying, and they’re
everywhere.”
It’s true; among those who know a little about North American birds,
starlings are not just disliked, they’re outright hated. In The Thing with
Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About
Being Human, birder and journalist Noah Strycker (famous for seeing
more species of birds on earth in one year than anyone, ever) writes, “If
you Google ‘America’s most hated bird,’ all of the top results refer to
starlings. Such universal agreement is rare in matters of opinion, but on
this everyone seems to concur: Starlings are rats with wings.” Birders
typically keep lists of the species they see on a field trip, but many don’t
even include the invasive starling on their tallies. Ornithological writer
and blogger Chris Petrak does list them, not because he is glad to spot
them but because he is “interested in those rare occasions when I can go
almost an entire day without seeing a starling, and those even rarer days
when I don’t see one at all.” The joy of a starling-less list. He goes on to
back up Strycker: “Bird lover or not, the starling is not a loved bird. In
fact, it is without a doubt the most hated bird in America.”
Common, invasive, aggressive, reviled. Starlings don’t just lie
beneath our notice, the sentiment runs, they are actually undeserving of
our notice. By rights, I know I should agree with the many guests in my
home who learn that a starling lives here and pronounce, “Oh, I am a
bird-lover, so I hate starlings.” I do detest the presence of the species in
North America. But this bird on my shoulder? Mischievous, clever,
disorderly, pestering, sparkling, sleepy? Yes, I confess, I couldn’t be
more fond of her.

People always ask how I get the ideas for my books; I think all authors
hear this question. And, at least for me, there is only one answer: You
can’t think up an idea. Instead, an idea flies into your brain—unbidden,
careening, and wild, like a bird out of the ether. And though there is a
measure of chance, luck, and grace involved, for the most part ideas
don’t rise from actual ether; instead, they spring from the metaphoric
opposite—from the rich soil that has been prepared, with and without our
knowledge, by the whole of our lives: what we do, what we know, what
we see, what we dream, what we fear, what we love.
For much of my life I have studied birds. I have watched them,
sketched them, scribbled notes about their habits and habitats. I have
spent hundreds of hours immersed in ornithological texts and journals. I
worked for a time as a raptor rehabilitator, and once I had done that, it
seemed that all the injured birds within a fifty-mile radius had a way of
finding me. People discovered wounded birds in their backyards and
brought them to me in small boxes. A flopping, broken-legged gull
turned up on my doorstep. One day while I was out for a walk, a
diseased robin fell from a tree and landed on the sidewalk literally at my
feet. And though I left rehab behind long ago, I have too often found
myself raising orphaned chicks of various species, or binding the wings
of injured birds, or making sick birds comfortable as they pass into the
next world. So it makes sense that my thoughts, my life, and my work
have been inspired by birds. But not by starlings. Because my subjects
included everyday nature and urban wildlife, I had written about
starlings out of necessity, but not out of true inspiration. Starlings, I felt,
deserved no such esteem.
And as a writer, of course, I live by inspiration. I watch it come and
go; when it’s missing, I pray for its reappearance. I light a candle and put
it in my window hoping that this little ritual might help inspiration find
its way back to me, like a lover lost in a snowstorm. The word itself is
beautiful. Inspire is from the Latin meaning “to be breathed upon; to be
breathed into.” Just as I ponder the migrations of birds, I ponder the
migrations of inspiration’s light breeze. If it’s not with me, where is it?
Where has it been? Who has it breathed upon while it was away, and
when, and how? Over and over again, I have come to terms with the sad
truth that inspiration never visits at my convenience, nor in accordance
with my sense of timing, nor at the behest of my will. Most of all, the
inspiration-wind has no interest whatsoever in what I think I want to
write about.

One day a couple of years ago I was gazing out of my study window and
noticed a plague of starlings on the grassy parking strip in front of the
house.* I was not looking for an idea that day—I had an engaging project
on my desk and was just pondering the next sentence, not the next book.
I pounded on the window to scare the starlings away, as I often do when
they gather in numbers. The other little neighborhood birds find groups
of starlings menacing—when starlings descend, the chickadees in my
hawthorn tree rush away, as do the bushtits, and even the larger robins.
Only the bold crows remain. So I pounded. The starlings flapped and
rose halfheartedly, then landed again and returned to their grubbing for
worms in the parking-strip grass. I rapped the window harder, and again
they lifted. But this time, they turned toward the light and I was dazzled
by the glistening iridescence of their breasts. So shimmery, ink black and
scattered with pearlescent spots, like snow in sun. Hated birds, lovely
birds. In this moment of conflicted beauty, a story I’d heard many times
leapt to mind.
Mozart kept a pet starling. I can’t even remember where I read that in
my ornithological studies—it is one of those arcane little details recorded
here and there, usually without substantiation. I repeated it myself in my
first book, Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds. Later, I was reading
Jim Lynch’s lovely novel Border Songs and discovered that one of his
characters mentioned it. When I asked Lynch where he’d heard about
Mozart’s starling, he told me, “I read it in your book.” Oh, dear! I began
to worry that I’d been spreading an apocryphal story, but further research
assured me that the tale was true. Mozart discovered the starling in a
Vienna pet shop, where the bird had somehow learned to sing the motif
from his newest piano concerto. Enchanted, he bought the bird for a few
kreuzer and kept it for three years before it died. Just how the starling
learned Mozart’s motif is a wonderful musico-ornithological mystery.
But there is one thing we know for certain: Mozart loved his starling.
Recent examination of his work during and after the period he lived with
the bird shows that the starling influenced his music and, I believe, at
least one of the opera world’s favorite characters. The starling was in
turn his companion, distraction, consolation, and muse. When his father,
Leopold, died, Wolfgang did not travel to Salzburg for the services.
When his starling died, two months later, Mozart hosted a formal funeral
in his garden and composed a whimsical elegy that proclaimed his
affinity with the starling’s friendly mischievousness and his sorrow over
the bird’s loss.
Mozart is only one of many composers and artists throughout the
centuries who’ve had birds as pets. Mozart kept canaries, too, at different
times in his life. But the fact that Mozart lived with, and loved, a starling
is extraordinary. One of the world’s greatest composers chose, as a
household companion, what is now one of the world’s most hated birds. I
have spoken with classical music lovers who are offended at the very
notion that Mozart might have been inspired by this invasive species, and
birdwatchers are just as indignant. What good could be associated with a
starling? Along with our understanding that starlings are common and
unwelcome arises an assumption that we humans tend to attach to all
things common and unwelcome: that they are also dirty, ugly, disease-
ridden, and probably dumb—certainly not proper consorts for genius.

While I was looking out that day at the pearly-snow-breasted starlings,

while I was thinking of their despisedness and their loveliness and
Mozart in one swirl, I noticed the music pouring from my iPhone
Pandora station. It was Mozart’s Prague Symphony. Other than being
composed by Mozart, this symphony has little to do with the tale of his
pet bird (it was written while they lived together, though I didn’t know
this at the time). But the synchronicity was enough for me. The hair on
the back of my neck prickled as I felt a new obsession take root in my
psyche. I could not stop wondering over the tangled story of Mozart and
his starling and felt that I was being pulled through an unseen gateway as
I began to follow the tale’s trail, uncovering all that I could from my
two-hundred-and-fifty-year remove.
What did Mozart learn from his bird? The juxtaposition of the hated
and sublime is fascinating enough. But how did they interact? What was
the source of their affinity? And how did the starling come to know
Mozart’s tune? I dove into research, poring over the academic literature.
I took to the streets, making detailed notes on the starlings in my
neighborhood. But gaps in my understanding of starling behavior
remained and niggled, and within a few weeks I reluctantly realized that
to truly understand what it meant for Mozart to live with a starling, I
would, like the maestro, have to live with a starling of my own.
I’d raised several starlings while working as a raptor rehabilitator for the
Vermont Institute of Natural Science many years ago. Starlings aren’t
raptors, of course, but people brought us all kinds of birds. It was the
official policy of the rehab facility to euthanize any starlings that came
through the door rather than lavish scarce resources on them and then
release them into the wild to wreak their ecological havoc. Most often
the starlings that came to us were babies, orphaned or cat-caught; the
people who brought them had no idea about the ecological conflict and
usually didn’t even know what kind of bird they had. They were just
filled with compassion for another creature that needed care and had
gone out of their way to act on their feelings as best they could. One little
boy, about eight years old, carefully held out a baby starling cradled in a
beautiful nest he’d made of grass and tissue. “Can you help him?” he
asked with wide, expectant eyes as his mother stood watching behind
him. What was I supposed to say? Sure, honey. Give me the bird—I’ll
wring his scruffy neck for you. It seemed to me that the lessons to be
gleaned in terms of respect for life and compassion for other creatures
outweighed any slight ecological impact the release of a few individual
starlings might have. So I became a renegade rehabber and made a deal
with the folks who brought starlings in: I’d tend the chicks on my own
time while they were in the precarious nestling phase, then give them
back to their young rescuers for final raising and release.
It was fun to have juvenile starlings around the house; they were
smart, busy, social, sweet, and made wonderful companions. But that
was when I lived in a group house with a bunch of other hippie graduate-
student ornithologists; having wild birds roaming around and a little bird
poop here and there seemed perfectly normal. I brought all manner of
birds home, from hummingbirds to hawks, and even great horned owls,
which my housemates made me keep in the laundry room because they
smelled of their last meal (skunk). And I’d always said good-bye to these
starlings once they were minimally self-sufficient, not after they’d grown
into aggressive, adult birds. What would it be like, I thought now, to
raise a starling for months, maybe years, in my grown-up household
where I had decent furniture, expensive musical instruments, work to
accomplish, and guests who would think I was batshit crazy?
It turns out that one little bird was capable of turning my household,
and my brain, completely upside down. I thought I was bringing a wild
starling into my home as a form of research for this book, but this bird
had ideas of her own. Instead of settling dutifully into her role as the
subject of my grandiose social-scientific-musical experiment, Carmen
turned the tables. She became the teacher, the guide, and I became an
unwitting student—or, more accurately, a pilgrim, a wondering journeyer
who had no idea what was to come. Following Mozart’s starling, and
mine, I was led on a crooked, beautiful, and unexpected path that wound
through Vienna and Salzburg, the symphony, the opera, ornithological
labs, the depths of music theory, and the field of linguistics. It led me to
outer space. It led me deep into the spirit of the natural world and our
constant wild animal companions. It led me to the understanding that
there is more possibility in our relationships with animals—with all the
creatures of the earth, not just the traditionally beautiful, or endangered,
or loved—than I had ever imagined. And in this potential for relationship
there lies our deepest source of creativity, of sustenance, of intelligence,
and of inspiration. Before all of this, though, I learned that obtaining a
starling, as abundant and legally unprotected as they may be, is not as
easy as you’d think. Mozart paid a few coins for his bird in a shop. My
route to acquiring a starling housemate was a bit more complicated.
 One

THE STARLING OF SEATTLE

The details of Carmen’s coming to live with me are admittedly a bit

sketchy—part rescue, part theft. A friend turned informant (who prefers
to remain anonymous—I’ll call him Phil) knew I was on the lookout for
an orphaned starling chick. He worked for the parks department and let
me know that the starling nests under the restroom roof at a park near my
home were slated for removal (or “sweeping”). I was aware of these
nests and had been checking on their occupants’ progress—the chirring
sounds coming from beneath the eaves told me that the babies had
already hatched. When I mentioned this to Phil, he said, “Yeah, well, you
know they’re just starlings.” Park officials do attempt to remove the
nests of unprotected pest species before chicks emerge from their eggs,
but sometimes the timing doesn’t work out, and the nests are removed
anyway. It is illegal under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to disturb, or
even touch, the nests of most birds, but anyone—government official or
private citizen—may with impunity destroy the nests and eggs of
starlings and kill the nestlings and adult birds any way he or she likes. As
nonnative invasive species, starlings, along with house sparrows and
pigeons, have no legal standing or protection.*
When federal or state fish and wildlife departments do work that
involves the killing of animals (like the shooting of overpopulous
Canada geese or white-tailed deer, or the trapping or shooting of urban
coyotes), it is usually accomplished under cover of darkness to prevent
protests by well-intentioned animal lovers. Starling nest removal is no
different. “It’s going down tonight,” Phil reported on the starling nest
sweep, and I giggled to myself, suddenly feeling like I was part of a bank
heist. I thanked Phil and arranged to meet my husband, Tom, at the park
after work—I would need his help. While it is legal to pluck a baby
starling from its nest, it would likely be misunderstood by any observers,
and I didn’t want to draw attention. The park was in high use that
evening, with thirty little boys running around in soccer cleats as their
coach yelled instructions in a lovely Welsh accent. We scoped out the
nest that seemed easiest to access and nonchalantly dragged the giant
plastic park garbage can into the men’s room. Tom climbed on top of it,
slipped his long arm between the top of the wall and the eave of the
roofline, and stretched toward the chirring sound. “Can’t reach,” he
announced, withdrawing his arm, scraped from the effort. We switched
places, thinking my smaller arm might slip through the wooden slats
more easily, which it did. I stood on my toes, felt over the matted grassy
nest stuffs, and stretched as far as I was able. I could actually feel the
warmth radiating from the bodies of the nestlings, but while my arm was
thinner than Tom’s (muscles, he likes to point out), it was also shorter. I
couldn’t get any closer to the chicks, and I gained a deeper appreciation
for the starling nesting strategy: they choose cavities that are set back far
enough to be out of the reach of nest-thieving predators (more often a
crow or a raccoon than a human).
“So I guess that’s it.” Tom shrugged. “We can’t get one.”
“Uh, you guess wrong,” I said, glowering. I took a break for
reconnaissance and spotted a little soccer boy headed toward the men’s
room, so I jumped out the door and leaned against the building, trying
not to look suspicious. When the coast was clear, I slipped back inside.
“Now get back up on that garbage can and get me a bird,” I bossed like a
wife in a bad sitcom. Tom sighed and dutifully climbed back up on the
can as I held it steady it with all my strength—I kept picturing the can
skidding out from under him and Tom dangling from the smelly
bathroom ceiling, broken-armed and clutching a starling chick. We had
repositioned the can so the lower roof ledge was smooshed right into
Tom’s armpit. “Hold out your hands,” he told me, and into them he
dropped the tiniest, ugliest, most unpromising little creature the earth has
ever brought forth.
I’d raised dozens of chicks of many different species, from
hummingbirds to red-tailed hawks, and of course the several starlings.
But until now I’d never seen a baby bird that was actually wheezing.
Like all songbird nestlings, this chick was mostly beak, with a big, fleshy
orange gape designed to serve as a target for adult birds: Drop food here.
When a chick is stimulated by movement and sound, the gaping response
is induced. Wanting to make sure this bird possessed some tiny
semblance of health, I tickled the bill and chirped like a starling; the little
bundle threw back its head, and the bill popped open 180 degrees.
Perfect.
This chick was only five or six days old and would require constant
care: a steady temperature of 85 degrees until its feathers grew, and
feedings every twenty minutes, dawn to dark. I had hoped to rescue a
bird that was a few days older, one that was still young enough to tame
but already raised into a bit more size and strength by its real bird
parents; I wished I could put this one back to cook a little longer. But the
nest was doomed, and with the arousal of my maternal instincts inspired
by the gaping experiment, I was already starting to bond with this sad
little chick—I couldn’t bring myself to return it to the nest to be swept
away with its ill-fated siblings. I knew I should get another chick to help
keep this one the proper temperature and to increase my chances of
ending up with one living, healthy starling for my research—baby birds,
captive or wild, are unsettlingly ephemeral, subject to respiratory
infections and weakened by ectoparasites of the sort I already saw
crawling on this chick’s bare skin. At this new request, Tom said—firmly
—“No fucking way.” He couldn’t and wouldn’t attempt to nab any more
chicks. I opened my mouth, then wisely closed it again.
So that was it. This was our starling. I could feel the naked,
translucent-skinned belly hot in my palm as the bird slept with its head
drooped on my thumb. I tucked the chick carefully into my handy baby-
bird incubator—my cleavage—and the three of us went home.
 Our sleepy starling chick on the day we brought it home. (Photograph by Tom
Furtwangler)

It was at this point that I morphed from “Lyanda the Innocent Citizen
Removing a Nonnative Bird from a Public Space” to “Lyanda the
Starling Outlaw.” As it turns out, you may torture, maim, or murder a
starling, but in Washington State, as in many states, you may not
lovingly raise a starling as a pet. One of the ostensible reasons given by
wildlife officials I spoke with was the prevention of propagation. There
are already too many starlings, and people raising them as pets might
eventually release the captive birds, making things worse. Something
like this happened in the case of the house finch, a native bird with a
geographic range that was once limited to the west side of the Rockies.
The males have bright red breasts, sing all year, and are easy to keep,
which made them marketable pets. In the 1940s, finches were illegally
netted along the West Coast and transported east, where they were
considered exotic and became popular. When there was an official
crackdown on the wild-bird-pet trade, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
finches were released in New York by dealers seeking to avoid charges.
The birds quickly acclimatized and eventually spread across the east side
of the continent.
In the case of the starling, though, that rationale doesn’t hold up. For
one thing, the species has already overrun the country; it would take a
huge number of released or escaped starlings to effect a noticeable
increase in their population. On the contrary, it is far more likely that the
removal of just one chick from the outside world could decrease the
future starling population by scores, possibly even hundreds, of birds.
(Starlings are able to reproduce at nine months old and often raise two
broods a year. Say our bird fledged just three young its first breeding
season, then those young, and all their future young, fledged three young
each year… the numbers scale up quickly.) I’m not suggesting that
starlings are a good pet choice for most people, but I do think the current
standard makes little sense. In my opinion, if starlings remain legally
unprotected, then we ought to be permitted to raise orphaned starlings in
our living rooms.

It took just a few minutes to get our new chick from the park bathroom
to its new home. I’d already prepared a mix of crushed dry cat food,
hard-boiled egg, applesauce, calcium, and avian vitamins, with just the
right balance of fat and protein for a baby starling. This I proffered in
tiny bites at the end of a wooden stirring stick pilfered from Starbucks.
(Baby bird, stirring sticks… my petty-theft rap sheet was growing by the
hour.)
Though the bird was a decent eater, it remained sneezy and parasite-
ridden. We hesitated to give it a name, not wanting to personalize our
relationship and become more attached than necessary to what might be
a transitory little life. Besides, we didn’t know if it was a male or a
female, so picking a name would be tricky.* Tom sometimes called the
chick “little buddy,” but overall we stuck with “it.”
For its first several weeks with us, the chick lived on the desk in my
writing studio. Its nest was a plastic cottage-cheese tub lined with paper
towels—I kept a roll handy so I could change them often. The tiny black
ectoparasites that jumped off its thin skin were easy to spot against the
white paper towels. I picked the nits up with tweezers and squished
them. Keeping the makeshift nest clean wasn’t difficult; most songbird-
nestling poo is encased in shiny, strong fecal sacs that the parent birds
remove with their bills and drop over the edge of the nest, so there is not
much mess. I just plucked these poo sacs out with my fingers. And like
other nestlings with an unconscious evolutionary imperative to keep a
clean and disease-free bed, our chick, when it got a bit older, hung its
rear over the edge of the nest and let its poo drop outside—theatrically
heaving its tiny bum to the plastic rim, wiggling its still-featherless tail
back and forth, and letting loose its impressive dropping with seeming
satisfaction before falling into one of its deep baby-bird slumbers.
Eat, poop, sleep. It reminded me of having a newborn human baby,
and in some respects it was even more restricting. The metabolic needs
of an unfeathered chick are high and constant. Watching backyard nests,
we can observe how frequently the parent birds come and go, bearing
wriggly gifts of protein-rich insects and larvae for their young. As the
stand-in parent bird, I had to feed my chick several times an hour. When
my daughter, Claire, now a teenager, was a baby, I could at least wrap
her in a blanket and take her out with me—with this bird, I could barely
leave the house. One day I decided to try packing its nest and food and
bringing it along on my errands, planning to feed it as I went, but the
chick quickly got too cold away from its heat lamp, so I ended up having
to shop for groceries that day with a baby bird nestled, once again,
between my breasts for warmth. For the most part, I was stuck at home.
If I happened to be away overlong, the Feed me! baby-starling chirring
sounds that poured forth from the tiny chick filled the entire house.
 Always hungry. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

At a couple weeks old, the chick started getting more mobile, and
though it stayed on my desk, I put its nest inside a ten-gallon glass
aquarium. It would jump out of the plastic tub and slump around the
floor of the aquarium, its cartilaginous legs not yet able to hold it up, but
it still preferred to sleep in its nest. This it accomplished extravagantly,
with its head hanging over the rim and breathing with that hot, baby-bird
heaviness (the cottage-cheese tub really was getting too small, but the
chick seemed attached to it and chose it over the larger Tupperware nest
I offered). When the little bird’s legs began to ossify and get stronger, I
added a low perch to one end of the tank, and it loved to jump on and off
the stick and practice balancing there. But right from the start, its favorite
place to play, sit, and sleep was on me. Tucked in my hands or on my
lap, under my shirt.
Baby songbirds are not downy like baby pheasants or chickens or
shorebirds or any of the other so-called precocial chicks that are born
ready to run about. They are naked at hatching. Horny, sheath-covered
pinfeathers emerge during the first week and take shape over the course
of several weeks—the birds “feather out,” as the ornithologists say. With
its prickly pins, our chick felt a bit like a hedgehog. But soon the little
starling’s pinfeathers unfurled. It became as soft as a bunny and could
stay warm more easily; now it liked to snuggle into the crook of my
elbow and—especially—on my neck, under my hair.
Our tuxedo cat, Delilah, was only too happy to help oversee the care
of the baby bird. She affected a great nonchalance, which fooled no one,
and sat on my desk along with the chick, my laptop and me between
them. Occasionally Delilah would lift her paw ever so slowly, and when
I glared at her she’d pretend she was just about to lick her toes and do
some face-cleaning. I never left Delilah alone with the chick, and
because she is good at opening doors, I had to pound a nail into the
molding by the doorknob so when I left the room, I could pull a thick
rubber band around the knob and over the nail to keep her out. Once I
forgot and when I came back to the study, there was Delilah sitting right
over the chick, their faces just inches apart. Delilah was purring.
Meanwhile, my constant care and parasite-picking seemed to be
paying off; the bird was flourishing. After four weeks, the shape of the
iris provided the first indicator of the chick’s sex, and we gladly replaced
the neutral pronoun it with she. We named the starling Carmen, which in
Latin means “song.”
 Two

MOZART AND THE MUSICAL THIEF

Raising a baby bird is harrowing. It’s difficult to duplicate the perfect

conditions of a nest, and at any moment, something can go wrong—a
slight variance in temperature one way or the other can cause a naked
nestling to freeze or die of heat exhaustion; the lack of an essential
ingredient in the diet can cause a failure to thrive and seemingly sudden
death; or a bird might just be sickly, as Carmen appeared to be, and not
survive chickhood. The night after we stole-rescued our baby starling, I
had a nightmare. In it, I walked up a dream-twisted staircase, through a
doorway, and into my own house. The bleeding bodies of almost-dead
starlings covered the floor. I woke up shivering and shook Tom. “Oh
God, oh God, oh God. Tom. This was a horrible mistake.” Tom rolled
over without breaking his snore. I threw on a robe, ran barefoot to my
study, and shone my iPhone flashlight on the chick. I watched her
breathe heavily. I checked the thermometer—a perfect 85 degrees
beneath the warm red-light lamp. I reached in and felt the chick’s body,
picked an errant nit. Then I pulled up a chair and watched the baby bird
breathe until morning.
 More bright-eyed by the day, but still vulnerable in the early weeks.
(Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

Hovering constantly over Carmen in her early weeks, I envied

Mozart, who’d had a pet starling but had skipped the angst of raising a
chick. The bird vendors of Vienna did not sell their birds until they were
sturdy and grown, and because it appears that Mozart’s starling was
singing a solid song on the day he bought it, we know that the bird had to
be a full adult, probably at least a year old. Younger birds practice songs
and mimicry, but few are accomplished enough to sing a line from a
Mozart concerto. And though it is impossible to be sure of the minutiae
involved in the procuring of Mozart’s starling, we do know many
essentials, including the lively time line.
April 12, 1784, Innere Stadt, Vienna. Mozart sat at the small desk in
his apartment, dipped his quill pen, and entered the lovely Piano
Concerto No. 17 in G in his log of completed work. This was Mozart’s
453rd finished composition; he was twenty-nine years old.
May 26. Mozart received confirmation from his father, Leopold, that
the fair copy of the concerto he had sent by postal carriage had arrived
safely in Salzburg. Wolfgang wrote back that he was eager to hear his
father’s opinion of this work and of the other pieces he had sent; he was
in no rush to have them back “so long as no one else gets hold of them.”
Mozart was always a little paranoid that his music might fall into the
wrong hands and be imitated or outright stolen by a lesser composer.*
As for what happened next, there are many possibilities. But it might
have gone something like this:
May 27, Graben Street. Mozart’s stockings pooled in wrinkles around
his ankles, and he paused on the bustling roadside to pull them up. As he
tucked the thin silk under his buttoned cuffs, he was startled by a
whistled tune. It was a bright-sweet melody, a fragment beautiful and
familiar. It took Mozart a wondering moment to recover from the shock
of hearing the refrain, but when he did, he followed the song. The
whistles repeated, leading him down the block and through a bird
vendor’s open shop door. There, just inside, Mozart was greeted by a
caged starling who jumped to the edge of his perch, cocked his head, and
stared intently into the maestro’s eyes, chirping warmly. This bird was
flirting! If there was one thing Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus
Theophilus Mozart responded to, it was flirting. Then the starling did it
again; he turned away from the composer, pointed his bill skyward,
fluffed his shimmering throat feathers, and sang the theme from the
allegretto in Mozart’s new concerto, completed just one month earlier
and never yet performed in public. Well, he almost sang the tune. The
starling made a minor rhythmic modification (a dramatic fermata at the
top of the phrase) and raised the last two Gs in the fragment to G-sharps,
but the basic motif was unmistakable.
The starling’s mimicry is not surprising in the least—as birds in the
mynah family, starlings are among the most capable animal mimics on
earth, rivaling parrots in their ability to expertly imitate birds, musical
instruments, and any other sounds and noises, including the human
voice. But how did the starling in the shop learn Mozart’s motif? The
composition was meant to be an absolute secret, not slated for public
performance until mid-June, when it would premiere under Mozart’s
direction with the gifted young student for whom it was written, Barbara
Ployer, at the piano.
Mozart was so delighted by the starling he almost forgot his shock.
He and the bird whistled phrases back and forth, sharing snippets of their
repertoires. Then Mozart pulled out his pocket notebook and copied out
the bird’s species name, Vogel Stahrl, a version of the German name for
the bird referred to as the European starling in North America and the
common starling in England.* One commentator claims that Mozart
named his bird Star, a misreading of his note that simply referred to the
species. Even so, it is handy to employ a moniker in telling a story, and
as there is no record of the bird’s actual name, Star will do nicely.
This story is not well known in its details, and some musicologists,
acquainted with only the surface of the tale, claim that Mozart must have
responded in a jealous fury to the bird’s pirated rendition of his own
composition. But when we look into the composer’s pocket notebook,
we see that nothing could be further from the truth. Beneath the words
Vogel Stahrl, Mozart wrote his own version of the tune, then the
starling’s version.

Mozart’s motif.

The starling’s song.

His comment on the starling’s interpretation? Das war schön! “That

was wonderful!”

It would not have been at all odd for Mozart to keep a bird. Pet birds
were popular in eighteenth-century Europe, part of the natural-history
trend that characterized Enlightenment attitudes in polite society.
Facilitated by an emerging international shipping trade, exotic birds such
as parrots and mynahs, as well as animals ranging from wombats and
kangaroos to great land tortoises, made their way into public menageries
and into increasingly popular animal- and bird-merchant shops. (“Can
peace be gained until I clasp my wombat?” Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote
to his brother in 1869 while waiting impatiently for his new pet to make
its way across the sea from Australia to England.)
 Exotic birds were expensive. In The Georgian Menagerie, cultural
historian Christopher Plumb writes that a parrot could cost as much as a
typical servant earned in a whole year, and bird-selling was good
business for high-end shopkeepers who could afford to have the exotic
species shipped in from Africa and Australia. But it was the trade in
native birds such as chaffinches, bullfinches, doves, and sometimes
starlings that made pet birds accessible to a wider population, bringing
both decorative and musical interest to the middle-class salon.
Little is known about the local bird catchers, many of whom lived in
near poverty at the fringes of society. They would catch, raise, and sell
birds to vendors with proper shops, or sometimes they would sell the
birds themselves, along with simple homemade cages, from seasonal
street stalls rented with their last pfennigs. These were often family
ventures, with tatterdemalion youngsters sent into the fields and
woodlands to check progress on nests and eggs. Nestlings were pilfered
and raised until they were grown, sturdy, and ready for sale. Though the
work was socially unrespected, it was not unskilled. Local bird catchers
might have been functionally illiterate, but they had to be accomplished
natural historians, knowing how to identify and name species, find nests,
and monitor the laying of eggs and the fledging of young. They had to
know how to hand-raise birds, diagnose health issues, and sometimes
cure them. They had to be thieves, scientists, veterinarians, and
businesspeople, all at once. And yet, as Plumb points out, most of what
we know of these tradespeople comes from court records in which they
are accused of drunkenness, robbery, or petty crimes. It seems they were
never considered part of the society in which the birds they raised found
homes.
It was surely one of these skilled ruffians who hand-raised the
starling Mozart chose before it arrived at the shop; the bird was tame and
friendly, and the practiced shopkeeper had no trouble catching it and
depositing it in a small wooden box lined with natural grasses that
Mozart carried home to his wife, Constanze, whistling all the while.
Mozart’s walk was a short one, but the noonday streets were bustling
with horses, wagons, and hackney carriages. Several of the city’s many
homeless dogs brushed his legs, but they ignored the maestro and his
mysterious box, intent on getting to the stalls of the street vendors who
migrated from the suburbs each morning with their offerings of eggs,
meats, cheeses, and wines; a well-behaved dog who sat quietly would get
plenty of scraps. There was high-piled hair and the flouncing of
hoopskirts, now in their last decade of popularity. There was the
fragrance of roasting chestnuts and the smoke of kitchen fires and the
manure from the carriage horses. There was, occasionally, the song of a
street musician. On a normal day, Mozart had an eye and ear for all of
this life—life everywhere was a thing to be drunk up and poured out
again in his music. But this day he took no notice of anything. His mind
was all on the little box. Mozart whispered to the bird within, maybe
telling him about his new home. Meanwhile, Star, who had loved this
man’s voice in the shop, was now huddled into the darkest corner of his
tiny crate, wide-eyed and silent. He was tame, yes, but no starling likes
to be stuffed into a coffer and carried about. The poor bird was terrified.
Soon, Mozart reached his apartment at 29 Graben, a fashionable
address—the Graben was then, as now, the central shopping and fashion
district. The Mozarts’ rooms were not spacious, but it was just the two of
them, Wolfgang and Constanze, along with their small dog, Gauckerl,
and now Star. Perhaps Wolfgang thought this new bird might bring a
cheering presence to the house. The couple’s first baby, little Raimund
Leopold, had died the previous year when he was just six weeks old. He
had been in the care of a wet nurse while Constanze and Wolfgang were
in Salzburg visiting the elder Leopold—Mozart’s attempt to sow
goodwill between father and wife (though Leopold had never met
Constanze, he was against the match from the start). The couple had left
Raimund fat and happy, and Mozart blamed the child’s death on their
decision to raise him on breast milk rather than water and coarse-milled
oats, as was commonly (and disastrously) recommended by the medical
men of the era. That May afternoon when Wolfgang turned up at the
Graben apartment with his starling in a box, Constanze was five months
pregnant with their second baby. The child would be named Carl
Thomas, and of the Mozarts’ six children, he was one of just two who
would survive to adulthood (it sounds shocking and sad, but this survival
rate was a bit above average).
In my imagining, Constanze was bemused and also a bit put out at the
new housemate (what pregnant woman needs something else to take care
of?), but she could not have been surprised. She knew that her husband
had been fond of pet birds from childhood—singing canaries, mostly.
Any consternation she felt was dispelled by Wolfgang’s unabashed joy.
Star was unnerved by his short journey but settled quickly into his new
cage, as these intelligent birds do, without much thrashing about. Wild
foods and seeds were typically sold at bird shops, but most likely Star
simply shared the family diet, feasting on bits and leftovers from the
Mozarts’ table, fed to him by hand or left in his cage. Starlings are
omnivores, and the varied scraps from an eighteenth-century middle-
class Viennese kitchen—meat, potatoes, fruits, and plenty of pastries—
probably offered just the right fat-protein balance for little Star. (Carmen
loves to nibble our leftovers; her favorites include lentils, spaghetti, and
couscous salad.)
It is not known whether Constanze had any childhood pets, but since
her father, Fridolin Weber, was a restive jack-of-all-musical-trades, their
lifestyle was probably too unsettled for animals. Constanze, who grew up
in the cultural and intellectual center of Mannheim, was the second of
four Weber sisters, all of whom had classically trained voices. During
Constanze’s teen years, the family moved frequently to promote the
singing career of the eldest sister, Aloysia.
Mozart was born and reared in provincial Salzburg but traveled
widely throughout Europe as a child prodigy, performing on the violin
and pianoforte alongside his sister Maria Anna (always called Nannerl),
a brilliant pianist in her own right. The children were usually
accompanied by both parents on these long and expensive journeys,
which were fraught with the many dangers of carriage travel: poor roads,
inclement weather, exposure to disease. Wolfgang was often sick and
near death more than once. His short stature was the subject of public
and medical comment and a concern to Leopold. Ill health would plague
him always.
There came a time when Leopold could no longer shirk his duties as
Kapellmeister to the prince-archbishop of Salzburg in order to parade his
young prodigies about Europe. So, beginning in 1777, Mozart’s mother,
Anna Maria, chaperoned the twenty-one-year-old Wolfgang on a sixteen-
month journey without Leopold (Nannerl stayed behind with her father
to look after the household). The first months were spent in Mannheim,
and then, at Leopold’s urging, mother and son continued to Paris. While
Wolfgang gallivanted about the city, teaching, composing, giving
recitals, dandying, and attempting to ingratiate himself with potential
patrons among the royalty and aristocracy, Anna Maria, who could not
go about unaccompanied in polite society, languished in their dank
rooms. “The stairs are so narrow,” she wrote to Leopold, “that it would
be impossible to carry up a klavier. Wolfgang cannot compose at home. I
never see him all the long day and shall forget altogether how to talk.”
She fell ill in Paris and died fairly quickly, a tragedy from which
Mozart’s spirit never fully healed.
Young Mozart, alone in Paris with the body of his mother, could not
bring himself to tell his father and sister what had happened. He lied in a
letter to Leopold: “I have to bring you some very distressing and Sad
news, which is the reason why I couldn’t reply earlier to your most
recent letter.… My dear Mother is very ill—she was bled, just as she had
it done always, and it was indeed necessary; afterward she felt somewhat
better—” He engaged a friend in Salzburg to break the news to his father
and didn’t write to Leopold with his own version of the truth for over a
week. “I hope that you and my dear sister will forgive me for this small
but necessary deception—when I thought about my own pain and
sadness in relation to how it might affect you, I simply could not bring
myself to overwhelm you with this distressing news.” Vestiges of guilt
and worry later emerged in his doting, anxious concern for his wife
(whom he could not bear to leave), for his children, for his dog, and, yes,
for his starling.
There is a heartbreaking oil portrait of the Mozarts that was
commissioned after Anna Maria’s death. The two grown children sit at
the fortepiano; their father, Leopold, stands in shadows with his violin;
and their beloved mother appears behind them in an oval-framed
painting, her hair piled high and wide and wound with a blue ribbon.
This portrait of the family is a powerful and ghostly presence at the
Mozart Geburtshaus now, hung in the back of the dark, windowless,
wood-rich room where Wolfgang was born. It is a bit discomfiting to
explore the rest of the exhibit with the family watching—rustling and
whispering and mourning there in the corner.
 Mozart family portrait. (Johann Nepomuk della Croce, 1781)

After his mother’s death, Mozart continued to travel extensively, but

Salzburg was home base. As Mozart’s genius crystallized in his early
twenties, the town began to feel too provincial to hold him. With
difficulty, he tore himself away from his fretting but highly intelligent
father.
Leopold is misunderstood in the modern Mozart mythology. His
difficult points—officiousness, anxiety, codependency, and
condescending micromanagement of his family’s activities—are well
documented; his controlling nature is so over the top that it’s almost
funny, and there are thousands of examples of it in the family
correspondence. When Anna Maria and Wolfgang were off traveling,
Leopold wrote constantly, instructing his fully competent wife on the
minutiae of business and life.

Wherever you are, always make sure that the innkeeper puts the
boot-trees in your boots.… The music can always remain in the
front in the trunk, but you should buy a large oilcloth and use both
this and the old one to wrap it well, in order to ensure that it’s
really safe.… I shall send fresh socks by postal carriage.

But Leopold loved his family rashly and dearly. He thoughtfully

homeschooled his children, not just in music but in all subjects. He was a
fine composer and a well-known violin pedagogue throughout Europe.
Without Leopold, we would never have heard of Wolfgang Mozart.
Even so, the relationship between father and son would always be
fraught. As Mozart grew into a young adult, Leopold could not keep
from insinuating himself into every aspect of Mozart’s life. No matter
where Wolfgang traveled, Leopold would send letter after disapproving
letter, insisting that Wolfgang find more ways to ingratiate himself with
the aristocracy, improve his connections with famous composers, and,
always, make more money; the letters were full of detailed advice on
exactly how Wolfgang should go about accomplishing all these things.
His love for Wolfgang shone through without fail, yet he could not help
constantly reminding his son how much the family had laid out for travel
and clothes and lodging in service to Wolfgang’s genius. He deployed a
complicated cloud of guilt, love, and indebtedness that followed his son
everywhere, and always.
After his wife’s passing, Leopold became even more clingy, anxious,
and controlling, and Wolfgang’s desire to leave Salzburg did not help.
Mozart provoked his own dismissal from his underpaid employ with
Salzburg’s Archbishop Colloredo and fairly ran away to Vienna, leaving
his talented sister behind in the throes of depression. Nannerl was now
the keeper of her father’s household and knew she had only two options
open to her: live as a respectable spinster, or marry. Both options
required that she give up her life as a musician. Leopold was focused
entirely on Wolfgang and no longer promoted his daughter’s talents. She
spent days in bed, suffering under the stark truth of what her life was to
become. (Eventually she would marry, though not happily.) The
spectacularly talented Nannerl stopped playing the pianoforte.
When Wolfgang and his mother were in Mannheim, they met the
musical Weber family. Mozart scarcely noticed Constanze, besotted as he
was by the eldest sister, Aloysia, with her fashionable beauty and her
diva’s soprano. Mozart concocted a wild plan in which he would run
away with Aloysia to Paris and compose arias for her pure voice that
would make them both famous. He wrote all about it to his father: Would
Leopold tell him what a prima donna earned in Verona?
Poor Leopold! When he read Wolfgang’s long missive outlining the
naive scheme, he fell into absolute fits. “My Dear Son,” he wrote, “I’ve
read through your letter of the 4th with bewilderment and shock.”
Leopold claimed to be so distressed that he had not slept the entire
previous night and as a result was so exhausted that he could hardly
write and struggled with each word. This did not stop him from
composing a letter that was dozens of pages long, expounding in great
detail on the folly of his son’s plan, which seemed, to Leopold, like a far-
fetched fantasy that would make social lepers of the entire family. “How
could you allow yourself even for a moment to be taken in by such an
appalling idea… to cast aside your reputation—your old parents, your
dear sister?… To expose me to mockery and yourself to contempt?”
Finally, he turned to his favored method of twisting the knife: guilt.
“Remember me as you saw me when you left us, standing wretchedly
beside your carriage; remember, too, that, although a sick man, I’d been
up till 2 o’clock, doing your packing, and was at your carriage again at 6,
seeing to everything for you—afflict me now if you can be so cruel!”
But in the end Leopold needn’t have worried, at least not about the
eldest Weber daughter. Aloysia swiftly jilted Wolfgang and married the
more mature, financially solvent (and much taller) Joseph Lange, an
actor, singer, and portrait painter. Mozart, meanwhile, traveled all over
Europe, composing and performing, and eventually returned to Vienna,
where the Webers now lived. Herr Weber had since passed, and Frau
Weber was taking in boarders to help make ends meet. Mozart roomed at
the Weber home for some weeks, and during this time he tidily
transferred his affections from Aloysia to her sister Constanze.
Wolfgang’s affections for Constanze might have been less youthfully
wild than his infatuation with Aloysia, but they were sincere. He
intended to marry her.
Leopold was in a disapproving tizzy over the impending nuptials. For
years he had been meticulously plotting the course of his son’s fame.
Now Wolfgang wanted to derail his own chances for renown and esteem
by marrying? And into a family whose name meant nothing, who had no
money, no prospects, no sons to ensure future income? Leopold despised
the lot of them, sight unseen. But Wolfgang was twenty-five years old
and ready to settle down. He was comfortable with the Webers, and
through simple proximity, he and Constanze had developed a dear
friendship and then, over the months, an intense affinity. He wrote to his
father with trepidation but was firm in his resolve:

The middle one, my good, dear Constanze, is the martyr of the

 family, and probably for that very reason, is the kindest-hearted,
the cleverest, in short the best of them all.

Hoping to appeal to Leopold’s concerns over economy, he

emphasized Constanze’s practical virtues:

I must make you better acquainted with the character of my

beloved Constanze;—she is not ugly, but also not really beautiful;
—her whole beauty consists of two little black eyes and a graceful
figure. She has no great wit but enough common sense… she is not
extravagant in her appearance, rumors to that effect are totally
false;—to the contrary, she is in the habit of dressing very
simply… and most of the things a woman needs, she can make
herself; indeed, she does her own hair every day.* She knows all
about householding and has the kindest heart in the world—I love
her and she loves me with all her heart—now tell me whether I
could wish for a better wife?

Constanze had plenty of wit. She possessed an artistic spirit and a

solid temperament. And in spite of the largeness of her husband’s
personality, she held on to a sense of bright independence. She traveled
and managed parts of the household music business. Mozart wrote songs
for her lovely soprano voice. She governed the couple’s ever-changing
financial situation as well as anyone could and maintained relative
equanimity amid the chaos of composing, parties, recitals, pregnancies,
children, and the labors of middle-class eighteenth-century domestic life
in dusty Vienna. Though Leopold was predisposed to find fault, even he
commented on Constanze’s commonsense home economics after his visit
to the young couple’s apartments. Wolfgang and Constanze’s marriage
was not without troubles, but it was a sweet one, and happy overall.

Star joined the family in the middle of the marriage, during the most
musically productive, prosperous, and engaging years of Mozart’s life.
He might have been the smallest member of the household and is barely
mentioned in most biographies, if he makes it in at all, but the starling is
never far from the center of Mozart’s unfolding story. Any Mozart
historian would give an arm for this bird’s-eye view of these years. Star’s
vocal acrobatics accompanied the composition of at least eight piano
concertos, three symphonies, and The Marriage of Figaro. He was
present for Leopold’s ten-week visit to the young couple’s house, the
only visit the elder Mozart would ever make. Star heard, and likely
joined in singing with, the debut of the Haydn Quartets, performed in the
parlor with Papa Haydn himself in attendance. Star was present in the
house during the birth of Carl Thomas, in 1784, and Johann Thomas
Leopold, in 1786. He witnessed, with his inquisitive starling’s eye, the
mourning in the household when tiny Johann Thomas died at just three
weeks old. Star has been considered a footnote to the Mozart biography,
but after living with a starling, I have become convinced that the bird
brought a constant current of liveliness, hope, and good cheer into these
complex years, one that sustained Mozart’s heart and music.

Three years after Mozart brought Star home, his father, Leopold, passed
away, leaving his son with a knotted mixture of guilt, mourning, and
relief. Mozart did not travel to the memorial in Salzburg, where Leopold
was buried without mourners. Mozart’s starling died just two months
later, and in honor of the bird, Mozart organized a formal funeral,
donned his most elegant finery, recruited friends as velvet-caped
mourners, and penned an affectionate elegy. My favorite translation is
Marcia Davenport’s, from her 1932 biography of Mozart, now out of
print; it captures the simultaneous jocularity and formality of the little
verse. After a few lines that announce the starling’s death, Wolfgang
laments:

Thinking of this, my heart

Is riven apart.
Oh reader! Shed a tear,
You also, here.
He was not naughty, quite,
 But gay and bright,
And under all his brag
A foolish wag.

The poem shows that Mozart had become thoroughly acquainted with
the typical starling personality—bright, personable, charming,
mischievous. Some historians have claimed that the funeral verses are
simply a farce, but no one who has lived with a starling would dream of
making such a suggestion.
 Three

UNINVITED GUEST, UNEXPECTED

WONDER

When Carmen was four weeks old and flapping about her aquarium, I
realized that she needed a larger home. We moved her downstairs into a
big cage on wheels. She still spent hours each day outside the cage,
cuddling with all of us and practicing her emerging flight skills. Starlings
are insatiably social and Carmen would call piteously when we were out
of her sight. When she needed to be in the cage (on hot days when we
had to have the windows open, or when we were cooking in the kitchen
with dangerously boiling water, or when we were eating and wanted to
keep her out of our food), we just wheeled it to wherever we were in the
house so she could see us and chatter with us.
By about this age, starlings have pretty much finished growing. They
get, if anything, a little smaller as they mature, shedding baby fat and
acquiring an adult sleekness. But they do get busier and more active.
Though Carmen’s cage was the largest I could find, I couldn’t imagine
keeping her there for long. My super-handy dad, Jerry, came to stay for a
few days to help me design and build a custom aviary in the corner of
our mudroom—a room within a room. I made sure Carmen’s cage was in
view as we worked so she could observe our progress on her new home.
Maybe if she watched it being built, it wouldn’t seem too big and
ominous when she moved in.
We made a sturdy frame with two-by-two-inch raw-cedar posts, used
lighter one-by-twos for struts, and neatly stapled metal-grid “hardware
cloth,” as it’s called, to the outside of the structure (rather than the inside,
to keep Carmen from getting her toenails stuck in the staples). We fit the
whole enclosure in the corner of the mudroom, a spacious throughway
between the kitchen and dining room, so that Carmen could see us and
hear us in the places where we spent most of our time. The aviary
reached from the floor to the ceiling, and the back wall ran along a huge
window with a view of trees, birds, and sky. The raw wood and metal
had a pleasing, natural look, and I added tree limbs for perches.*
It took two days of dawn-to-dark cutting and pounding, several trips
to the hardware store, and lots of swearing on the part of my dad, but
finally the beautiful aviary was ready. Jerry and I surveyed our
handiwork, high-fived, and poured a celebratory beer. But Carmen was
wary. Starlings are like cats—though they are brave and inquisitive, they
also like routine, and this was a whole new world.

Carmen full grown at six weeks, and feathered out in her gray juvenal
plumage. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

While Jerry finished his beer, I decided it was time to introduce our
little bird to her new home. I stood in the aviary’s doorway with Carmen
on my shoulder. Her eyes grew large. I stepped inside and stayed there
with her among the branches so she could get her bearings. I could feel
her feet tighten uncertainly on my shoulder, but after about fifteen
minutes I gently coaxed her onto a branch and slipped out the door. She
squeezed into the highest corner and stayed there, silent and
overwhelmed, for about an hour. The next hour she began to explore
quietly. By the third hour Carmen had taken full possession of her aviary
and was hopping confidently from perch to perch.
There are tiny mirrors and all kinds of toys that I switch out daily to
keep her interested (her favorites are empty milk cartons on the floor that
she can overturn and stomp on and plastic bottles that she can practice
rolling around on). There is lots of room to fly and explore. As
frequently as possible, I leave the door open so she can come and go as
she likes, but even then she will often just hang out in her aviary,
sometimes flying between my shoulder and her favorite branch and back
again. “Good flying!” I tell her, wanting to encourage healthy exercise.
The aviary is her home, her safe place. When she is alarmed, or bored, or
sleepy, or preening after a bath, that is where she wants to be. And when
she steals things from the household that she is not supposed to (like
thumbtacks or money), that is where she goes to hide them.
We designed the door to be big enough for humans to walk through,
for ease of cleaning, and as we worked, we decided to make it a Dutch
door, two half-doors, one on top of the other. We thought this would
make the door less unwieldy and help it maintain its integrity on the
hinges over time, but it turns out to be one of Carmen’s favorite things
about her home—she likes to have the top door open so she can perch on
the closed bottom door and survey her domain. She is a bit shy of new
people, and this is where she prefers to sit—on her split-level door—
when guests visit. Here she can get a good look at the interloper but still
be able to make a quick getaway to the comfort of her favorite branch
inside the aviary if she gets scared. Meanwhile, it is a nice place for
guests to view her without looking through cage wires.
Soon after we finished the aviary, Carmen began her first molt, from
her plain gray juvenal plumage to her first adult plumage. Every day she
became more spotted and glistening. One of the most frequent comments
I hear about Carmen is “But she’s so pretty. This isn’t what all starlings
look like.” It seems that because starlings are so despised, they are also
expected to be ugly, or at least plain. Carmen is more beautiful to me
than other starlings are because I know her personality and have grown
fond of her. But as starlings go, she is no great looker. If anything, she is
a bit spindly, as her pectoral muscles are not well formed due to a lack of
extended flight. She is tidy and clean, but so are all healthy young birds.

First fresh, starry adult plumage. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

I think the thing that most surprises people about Carmen is her
glitteriness. Like all starlings’, Carmen’s plumage is iridescent—muted
black when seen from one angle but coming to shimmery life when seen
from a slightly different one or in a certain slant of light. Starlings are
painted like oil slicks, layered with shining purple, blue, magenta, and
green. Iridescence in feathers is created through structural changes in the
feather surface that make them appear vibrant at certain angles—
microscopic bumps and ridges on the barbs and barbules refract and
scatter light. The gorget of a hummingbird—garnet at one glance, brown
at another—is the crown-jewel example.
When starlings molt in the fall, many of their fresh iridescent feathers
are tipped with white, giving the birds their celestial pattern. But the
structural changes that make starling feathers iridescent also give the
feathers added strength, protecting them from extremes of light and
weather. Without the reinforcing benefits of coloration, the starling’s
white tips wear off in the winter, leaving the birds all glistening black in
the spring. It’s a unique strategy for acquiring breeding plumage—most
songbirds molt into bright new breeding feathers to attract a mate in the
spring, but starlings simply wear away their white to come up with a
glimmery new look for the season.* To birds, most of which can see on
the ultraviolet spectrum invisible to humans, iridescent starling bodies
literally glow. Even if you don’t have UV vision, a starling in sunlight is
absolutely stunning.
 Even in black-and-white, the details of a starling’s plumage are wondrous.
From top to bottom, this close-up shows the small covert feathers over the
wing, the shorter secondary wing feathers, the long-lined edges of the primary
wing feathers, and the pointed breast feathers. (Photograph by Tom
Furtwangler)
 It is intriguing that a bird so common, likely the bird most often seen
by city dwellers, is so little understood, or even recognized. In spite of
the starling’s unique, sparkling plumage, the majority of people,
including urbanites who live alongside starlings every day, cannot
accurately identify them. Many confuse starlings with the much less
sparkly blackbirds, or even with baby crows. (All three of these birds are
in the large Passeriformes order of so-called songbirds, but other than
that, they are not closely related, and baby crows, once they are walking
about, are no smaller than adult crows.)
The starling species common in North America is the European
starling, one of the Old World Sturnidae family, a group that includes
more than a hundred species of starlings, mynas, and oxpeckers spread
across Europe, Asia, and Africa. All starling species are shimmery,
precocious, terrestrial, gregarious, vocal birds, all of them iridescent,
many of them extremely colorful—shades of cobalt, magenta, and
brightest yellow. The superb starling of East Africa is among the most
stunning small birds in the world, with brilliant turquoise and black
plumage and shining golden eyes. One of them stole a piece of my
sandwich as I was picnicking beneath a tree overlooking Lake Manyara
in Tanzania. At first, the starling seemed quite polite about it, stepping
up and tilting his head to one side, looking at me with his sun-yellow
eye. I half expected him to say, “May I please have just a bit of crust?
Perhaps a nibble of that lettuce?” But then he jumped in and took a bite
so fast I hardly saw it happen. The native range of the European starling
extends across all of temperate Europe and West Asia, but the species
has been introduced in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina,
and North America, and the birds have spread just about everywhere else
except, thankfully, the neotropics, where their impact on delicate native
songbird populations could prove devastating.
Regarding the presence of starlings in North America, some blame
Shakespeare. In the 1800s, “acclimatization societies” began to form
across the country, following successful models in France. It was a
vulnerable time for many newcomers to America, who were homesick
and hungry for the arts, literature, flowers, and birds of their homeland.
The aim of the societies was to introduce European species that would be
“interesting and useful” to the seemingly deprived New World species
that would offer aesthetic and sentimental inspiration through beauty and
song.
 Eugene Schieffelin was a pharmacist who lived in the Bronx. He was
an eccentric, an Anglophile, and a Shakespeare aficionado. Some say he
was also an ecological criminal and a lunatic, but I would argue for a
gentler description; perhaps “flawed.” As deputy of the American
Acclimatization Society of New York, Schieffelin, it is believed, latched
onto the personal goal of bringing every bird mentioned in the works of
Shakespeare to Central Park. Armed with his treasured copy of the
exquisite Ornithology of Shakespeare, an 1871 volume in which James
Edmund Harting assembled every allusion to birdlife in the whole of the
Shakespeare canon, Schieffelin zeroed in on the Bard’s single reference
to a starling, in Henry IV. It is a decisive scene: King Henry commands
that the willful soldier Hotspur free his prisoners, but Hotspur replies that
he will do nothing of the kind until the king agrees to pay the ransom
that will free Hotspur’s brother-in-law Mortimer from the enemy. The
king flies into a fury and forbids him to mention Mortimer’s name. After
the king’s exit, Hotspur imagines a fanciful retribution, and here enters
our star:

He said he would not ransom Mortimer;

Forbad my tongue to speak of Mortimer;
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I’ll holloa, “Mortimer!”
Nay.
I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.

Shakespeare was attentive to birdlife; larks, nightingales, and

chaffinches wing and sing their way through the plays and sonnets, and
in his unique Ornithology, Harting cataloged every one and quoted the
lines in which they appear. The acclimatization societies did in fact try to
bring in many of these species, but with the obsessive powers of a true
eccentric, Schieffelin fixated on this one slender reference to the starling.
Introductions of Shakespearean chaffinches, nightingales, and skylarks,
and earlier efforts by Schieffelin to establish starlings, had resulted in
nothing but cold, starved dead birds. Eugene resolved that his next
starling attempt would not fail.
In 1890, he paid out a princely sum from his private stores (surely
enough to satisfy Mortimer’s ransom) to purchase eighty starlings from
an English source, and he perhaps laid out a bit extra to ensure that they
would be well tended on their long journey to the New York port, where
Schieffelin met them in person, enlisting help from his houseman to
carry their crates. He released his bewildered birds on a snowy March
day in the middle of Central Park. I think of him there—gloved, worried,
flush with hope and an honest, if misguided, love. The release could not
have been all he’d envisioned. The birds would have been tentative in
the cold and the snow, perching uncertainly in the leafless maples. This
was not the romantic bursting into flight that Schieffelin had surely
imagined. But eventually the birds lifted into the gray winter skies.
Genetic research in sample populations across the continent leads
ornithologists to believe that all of the two hundred million–some
starlings in North America, including my little Carmen, are descendants
of Schieffelin’s birds.* (It’s interesting to note that our starlings have
quantifiably less genetic variation than starlings in their native European
range. This is in line with what evolutionary biologists call the “founder
effect,” in which the number of animals introduced—in this case,
Schieffelin’s eighty-odd birds—is not large enough to contain all the
genetic variation of the original population.)
The spread of the starling was swift and complete. The Central Park
birds dispersed into an emerging starling Shangri-la. They were
accustomed to human presence and habitation in their home in England;
the young city of New York would not have fazed them in the least.
Some birds stayed close to Central Park; others flew to growing
neighborhoods that provided warmth (sheltered buildings and perches
above heated chimneys), food (human leftovers and leafy parks inhabited
by tasty grubs and insects), nesting places (cavities created by building
cornices and exhaust tubes), and ample foraging (grassy expanses in
parks and gardens). Their progeny spread to other developing towns, first
nearby, then farther and farther across the land. More descendants
flocked to agricultural areas, where they easily found sustenance in the
form of grain and fruit crops.
Starlings exhibit every characteristic of a successful animal invader:
they are robust, aggressive, omnivorous, and unfussy about nest spots,
and they reach sexual maturity at just nine months. They reproduce
prolifically, with two clutches per season, sometimes more, and raise
large broods of four to six chicks. (One clutch is the norm for most
migrant songbirds, though nonmigratory resident birds in temperate
climates—like robins and chickadees—will often raise two broods.)
Starlings are inquisitive and intelligent, which makes them adaptable and
ready to explore and colonize new places.
We know that curiosity killed the cat, and to make up for this, cats are
granted nine lives. It is difficult to imagine a more brazenly curious
creature than the starling, and to balance things out, it seems they ought
to have nine thousand lives. People who live with starlings know this.
There is a website administered from New York City called Starling
Talk, where people who have starlings as pets gather to discuss matters
such as the raising of baby starlings, starling health and diet, and the
general wild craziness of life with a starling in the house. Nearly all the
Starling Talkers came to have a starling because they found an injured or
orphaned bird and, since starlings are unwanted by rehab centers,
decided to take the care of the bird into their own hands. The discussion
at the website is lively and, as with any obscure social coterie, often
veers into the arcane and nerdy—matters that only other starling-keepers
would care about or understand.
Starling Talk members have learned from sad experience that if you
have a starling loose in the house, you must avoid leaving glasses of any
liquid on the counter so that your bird will not lean in to drink it, get its
wings pinned, and drown; close the toilet lid before flushing so the
curious bird does not follow the entrancing swirl down the pipe; take
care in using the garbage disposal; make sure before you turn on the
microwave that your bird has not somehow slipped in; refrain from
chopping vegetables with large knives, as starlings cannot help
investigating with tiny bills and toes that are all too easy to inadvertently
slice off. You have to watch your step—starlings are so completely at
home with their human flock-families that they are constantly underfoot,
and it’s easy to accidentally trample their tiny, hollow-boned little
bodies. One day I couldn’t find Carmen anywhere, and finally, after
about an hour of searching, I took a break, deciding she was probably
napping somewhere and would turn up when she was ready. Besides, I
was getting hungry. When I opened the refrigerator to get the peanut
butter for my sandwich, she jumped off the shelf next to the eggs and
rushed to my shoulder. She tried to shake the cold off her feathers, and I
tucked her under my shirt to thaw. Poor little thing. I can’t imagine how
she jumped in there without my knowing, but other than being a bit
chilled, she seemed fine.

I almost sweep Carmen into the dustpan pretty much every day. She likes to
play right under the path of the broom. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

Starlings bring this bright curiosity to the exploration of their world,

and the only habitats in North America that starlings avoid are large
expanses of wooded or forested areas, arid chaparral, and desert.
Ornithologist Paul Cabe proclaims that given the starling’s omnivorous
diet and ability to make use of buildings as nest sites, no native bird in
North America, not even the crow, is better adapted to the urban wilds
than this invader. It took starlings just eighty years after their release in
Central Park to populate the entire continent. Eugene Schieffelin lived to
realize that his starling introduction succeeded, but he could not have
predicted how the story would unfold over the next century. What would
Schieffelin make of his triumph now? In Tinkering with Eden, Kim Todd
suggests that he ought to have read his revered Shakespeare more
closely. In Henry IV, “the starling was not a gift to inspire romance or
lyric poetry. It was a bird to prod anger, to pick at a scab, to serve as a
reminder of trouble. It was a curse.” Perhaps even Schieffelin would
realize that no matter how pretty the starlings were, how mesmerizing
their vast autumn cloud-flocks, here was an experiment that had gone
terribly wrong.
Since that fateful introduction, starlings have made poor guests as
they spread across the country, and I regret to admit that Carmen is no
exception. The first time we had to go out of town and leave Carmen for
several days, I wasn’t sure what to do. I could have just had someone
come in to feed her and change the newspapers that line her cage, but
since starlings are so social, I worried about her becoming neurotically
lonely and pulling out her feathers, as isolated parrots do. My friend
Trileigh Tucker is a geology professor, birdwatcher, naturalist, and Crazy
Cat Lady (just five at the moment). I knew she would be the perfect
starling-sitter, and Trileigh kindly (or maybe naively) agreed. I coaxed
Carmen into Delilah’s kitty-travel box and loaded her old rolling cage
into the back of the Subaru—this would be her guest room. At Trileigh’s
house I gently held the kitty box and (remembering Mozart’s journey
with boxed-up Star from the bird shop to his home) whispered
encouragement to the horrified Carmen, while Trileigh and her tolerant
partner, Rob, gingerly maneuvered the cage up their narrow stairway and
into Trileigh’s home office. Carmen settled in quickly and I left feeling
reassured.
Upon our return, Trileigh informed me that Carmen’s first act as a
houseguest when she was let out of her cage was to fly to the aquarium,
perch on its edge, and, quick as a great blue heron, pluck out a shining
purple guppy. It happened “instantly,” Trileigh marveled, before she had
time to blink. Carmen always knows when she has taken something she
isn’t supposed to have, and she flew with her prize to the top of a
bookshelf, out of reach. Trileigh yelled and waved her arms helplessly as
Carmen swallowed the guppy. In spite of this bad behavior, Carmen was
invited back, and Trileigh has claimed the dubious distinction of starling
auntie.
Carmen was acting true to her species’ form. Starlings have behaved
atrociously in their New World. They feast in great flocks on agricultural
crops—wheat sprouts, young corn, apples, cherries, and berries. They
lurk by the tens of thousands around corporate agriculture facilities and
binge on feed in the troughs of cattle and swine, picking out the most
nutritious bits and leaving the dross for the farm animals. According to
an estimate by Cornell University researchers, in the U.S., starlings cause
eight hundred million dollars in agricultural damage every year.
But the harm from starlings extends far beyond the agricultural realm.
Their swirling skyborne murmurations spiral down into roosts on urban
buildings and at suburban park edges, creating noise, odor, and filth.
Starling feces in some populations may contain histoplasmosis, a fungus
that affects humans and other mammals; any resulting illness is usually
so minor that it is undetectable, but the fungus can lead to respiratory
infections and, in extreme cases, pneumonia, blindness, and even death.*
In 1960, a Lockheed L-188 Electra serving Eastern Airlines Flight
375 took off from Boston’s Logan Airport for Philadelphia and other
points south. Seconds after takeoff, the plane collided with a flock of
twenty thousand starlings. Hundreds of birds were sucked into the
machinery; two of the four engines lost power, and the plane plunged
into the sea. Sixty-two people died, including several who were in town
for a shoe-sales conference. After the crash, officials tested seasoned
pilots on flight simulators to see if any of them could have saved the
plane in such a scenario. All failed. In more testing, live starlings were
thrown into running engines. It was found that just three or four birds
could cause a dangerous power drop. The crash of Flight 375 ushered in
a sense of realism that shook the industry and the imagination of a
country that, in 1960, was still enamored of air travel. There are multiple
stories of starling-airplane collisions, but this is one of the few that
resulted in an actual crash or human injury. It remains the worst crash
caused by a collision with birds in airline history. After the crash,
wildlife-management plans became part of airport construction and
maintenance. Even so, aircraft collisions with starling flocks, or
sometimes just the threat of such collisions, result in occasional
unscheduled landings, delayed departures, and expensive repairs.
Human deaths are serious, but this crash was a long time ago; most
birders know nothing about it and hate starlings anyway. Beyond the
costly crop damage, beyond the excrement that collects beneath urban
roosts, and beyond the trees full of loud screeching birds, starlings are
despised above all else in conservation circles for their ability to
outcompete native birds for food and, more important, a limited number
of nest sites. Starlings are cavity nesters, and early each spring they will
start investigating crevices in buildings, homes, and birdhouses, as well
as holes that have been carved into trees and electrical poles by
woodpeckers. They compete directly for these prized sites with the other
cavity nesters, including chickadees, bluebirds, and swallows.
Self-proclaimed starling vigilantes across the country have taken
matters into their own hands. One woman on a Seattle birders’ forum
proudly catches starlings in Havahart traps, then drowns them; she is
downright gleeful when reporting that some of the birds die from
overheating in cages left exposed to hours of sun or from fright-inspired
little starling heart attacks so she doesn’t even have to dunk them.
(Havaharts are cages that trap animals without killing them, ironically
named in this case.) She urges us all to follow her good example.
On a much wider scale, farmers, government agencies, conservation
organizations, and urban businesses fed up with destruction, poop, and
noise have for decades been attempting to eradicate, or at least decrease,
starling populations. Imaginative but failed efforts have included
elaborate traps; explosives; plastic owls; spreading itching powder over
foraging areas; irradiating birds with cobalt-60; amplifying starling
distress calls; various poisons; toxic chemical sprays; firing pyrotechnics
over roosting areas; laying live wire in gathering places to electrocute
starlings through their tiny feet; and spraying flocks with a wetting
potion that won’t dry until the birds freeze to death. The chemical salt
DRC-1339, trademarked as Starlicide by Ralston-Purina in the 1960s,
kills starlings horribly over a period of days by uremic poisoning. It
remains in wide use. In 2015, U.S. government agents killed over a
million starlings—more than any other so-called nuisance species.* That
number is typical for a given year, but the annual killings have made no
dent in starling populations. And they never will. There are simply too
many starlings, and they are too good at reproducing and surviving for
population-level efforts to be effective. “It’s sort of like bailing the ocean
with a thimble,” lamented the late Richard Dolbeer, who was a well-
known wildlife official in Ohio. Instead, we need to address the much
more difficult task of thinking ecologically, of creating human-inhabited
areas that are less inviting to starlings and that allow native birds to
flourish.
Meanwhile, though I am not a starling apologist (I wish them
eradicated from the country as much as anyone—as long as Carmen
stays here with me), it is important to consider a few emerging facts
about starlings. First, while their populations grew and spread
exponentially for decades, they have for the last thirty years or so been
stable. In most places, starling counts are no longer increasing. Every
species has a carrying capacity—a number of individuals that can thrive
in a given place without exhausting the necessary resources. Starling
populations seem to have peaked.
Further, at least some of the species’ impact on native birdlife may
turn out to be more perceived than real. Any observant neighborhood
birdwatcher has seen starlings behaving badly to the nicer little birds, so
the anecdotal evidence against starlings is strong. Not only do they claim
the best cavity nest sites early in the spring, but they sometimes actually
invade a nest that is already inhabited by a native bird, throw the bird out
in a flurry of snapping bills and slapping wings (occasionally killing the
bird; usually not), destroy the bird’s eggs, and make themselves at home.
But a respected study reveals that rather than giving up, many of these
displaced birds simply nest elsewhere. In 2002, researchers at Berkeley
completed a years-long survey designed to document the impact of
starlings on native birds. To their amazement, they were not able to
determine quantifiable harm. Historical population records for the
twenty-seven cavity-nesting species believed to be most at risk from
starlings were examined from pre-starling times to the present; the
species included woodpeckers, kestrels, swallows, flycatchers, and
bluebirds. Most of the species’ populations showed no decline, not even
the red-bellied woodpecker’s, a species of most concern because nest
usurpation by starlings has long been observed and recorded. Five
species in the group showed insignificant declines, and five species’
populations actually increased, but none of these changes appeared to be
directly linked to the presence of starlings.
I asked lead author Walter Koenig, now at Cornell, how he felt about
the study’s findings, which he’d known would be unpopular in
conservation circles, where the hatred of starlings is an unquestioned—
almost cherished—conviction. “I’m not sure I was surprised by the
results,” he told me, “but I was a tad annoyed.” Dr. Koenig studies acorn
woodpeckers, and starlings will often usurp the only nests in his study
site. He is the last person who would want to exonerate these birds. Still,
he cannot claim that his woodpeckers’ overall populations are affected.
“The bottom line,” says Koenig, “is that we know that starlings are quite
aggressive and compete for nest cavities with a whole slew of native
species. But the evidence that this competition has led to significant
population declines is pretty slim, at best.” Yet like most ornithologists,
he isn’t about to go soft on starlings: “I certainly can’t say that’s changed
my attitude toward them; I still don’t hesitate to shoot them when I have
the chance.”
 In 1939, a not-yet-famous Rachel Carson penned an essay entitled
“How About Citizenship Papers for the Starling?” In it she argued that
instead of seeing the bird as an invader, people should accept starlings as
a regular species in the native avifauna and give up talk of “invasive”
and “nonnative.” After all, the bird was here to stay and was, moreover,
earning its keep, since starlings feast gluttonously on cutworms, an
agricultural menace. (As naturalist George Laycock put it, “Starlings do
nothing in moderation.”) Carson’s notion is echoed in the stance of some
modern conservationists, who are turning a corner in the way they think
about some invasives. There are many invasive species, like the starling,
that are simply ineradicable; instead of spending time and effort
worrying about such species, the argument runs, we should accept them
as part of the changing modern landscape and move on to issues that we
can actually do something about.
Koenig’s results notwithstanding, I believe that such thinking leads to
a dangerous complacency. Yes, starlings are a permanent part of the
urban landscape, and I absolutely do not support harming individual
birds (I won’t be picking up a shotgun anytime soon). But like Koenig, I
am not ready to quit defending native habitats from this invasive species.
For one thing, though Koenig’s study is a good one, it is not definitive.
He recognizes that the historical data he examined may not have been
gathered consistently and that if the study had continued, we would
likely find that starling competition, alongside native habitat loss from
human growth, negatively affects some species—not just the cavity
nesters, but also the less aggressive songbirds that feed in areas where
starling numbers are high. Of course, all the other impacts of starlings,
including those on large and small farms, remain unquestioned. But in
terms of conservation, the most significant point to remember is that
starlings thrive in areas that are disturbed by human presence, including
dense urban environments—places that more sensitive species simply
cannot survive in the long term. For now, it seems some birds go
elsewhere when their nests are usurped by starlings. But as human
sprawl continues, good habitat areas are getting smaller and smaller and
may someday disappear altogether. What happens when there is no
“elsewhere”? Do we shrug our shoulders and accept that we have created
a world in which only starlings and a few other robust species can
manage to thrive?
Regarding starlings, we can all share responsibility for keeping their
numbers to a minimum by covering tubes and other openings on our
homes that provide possible nest sites; putting up nest boxes with holes
suitable for chickadees, swallows, and bluebirds but too small for
starlings; and removing the starling nests and eggs that do appear. But
our task is not simply to get rid of starlings. We need to design human
landscapes that are hospitable to more species of native birds. This
means less grass and more trees. We need to lobby for the creation and
protection of woodland parks and forests on large and small scales.
Recent studies on the presence of trees show us two beautiful and
related facts: that even a few trees in urban neighborhoods will increase
the diversity of bird species, and that people who live near trees are
healthier—both mentally and physically—than those who don’t. A treed
landscape benefits birds and humans together. In addition to starlings,
some native birds (robins, flickers, and of course crows) seem to manage
well in suburban areas with huge expanses of grass. But yards with trees
—any trees at all—attract more varieties of native birds, as if by magic.
Wrens, chickadees, tanagers, woodland thrushes, woodpeckers of all
kinds. It is so simple for all of us to take part in the re-wilding of the
places we live every day, to increase beauty, and wilderness, and
wildness, even on the smallest scales.

In 1939, when Rachel Carson wrote her essay suggesting people learn to
accept starlings, there were far fewer of them around. It is difficult to
imagine that Carson, an early ecologist and a lover of birds, would have
maintained this position in light of the starlings’ increase and impact in
the decades to follow (and while backyard starlings might actually
benefit our gardens, in agricultural areas, they do more harm than good,
no matter how many cutworms they eat). Still, it is thought-provoking to
ponder this defense of the country’s most despised bird coming from one
of its most revered nature writers and defenders.
I do know that Carson would have loved meeting Carmen—it was
always a delight for her to interact with individual wild animals, and she
was enamored of birds. It would have enchanted her to have Carmen
light on her shoulder, poop on her pale blue cashmere sweater, and peck
at her midcentury clip-on earrings. Wild starlings fascinated her, too, and
her field books contained meticulous notes and sketches of their
morphology, behavior, and unique foraging habits.
Like anyone who has spent time observing starlings, Carson
perceived that wild starlings work hard for their food. Most birds that eat
grubs and worms search for them visually or peck at the earth with a
closed bill to seek out nutritious treats. Starlings actually create holes in
the earth by poking their closed bills into the ground, then using their
extra-strong mandibular abductor muscles—the muscles that open the
bill—to excavate a hole in which to search for wormy prey. We can
discover where starlings have been feasting on our lawns and in our
parks by the presence of these gape holes. Starling bodies are built for
this; their squat, strong legs keep them close to the ground, providing
leverage and, of course, giving starlings their characteristic waddle.
This unique behavior is one of the things that helped starlings take
over human-inhabited places. Wherever humans go, we spread grass in
our wake—expansive urban parks, suburban lawns, golf courses,
graveyards—and grass is the ideal substrate for the starling’s gape-
foraging technique. But living with Carmen, I’ve discovered that the
distinctive gaping behavior is related not just to how starlings eat, but
also to how they learn.* Most birds explore their world by pecking at it;
starlings gather information by gaping at things. If Carmen encounters
something new or interesting, even something that is clearly not food,
she doesn’t poke at it—she attempts to open it, placing the point of her
closed bill on the spot she wants to investigate, then opening her bill
quick and wide, over and over.
When she started to exhibit this behavior at just five weeks old, I
began paying more careful attention to the other juvenile starlings in the
neighborhood, those just Carmen’s age, and realized that though they
weren’t feeding themselves yet, they were using this adult feeding action
to explore their world. Even more intriguing, I observed that adult
starlings consistently do this too—explore objects that they likely do not
recognize as food sources by this peck-then-open-bill gaping behavior.
It’s fascinating to watch.
This morning Carmen flew out of her aviary and onto my arm, where
she promptly began to explore the folds of my sleeve, investigating every
little crease and crinkle, then moving on to the spaces between my
fingers and opening them, one by one. I like to hold my fist tightly
closed to get her riled up and give her something to do. She raises her
hackles and chirps crossly as she pries at my knuckles. It’s so much fun
to pester her. She attempts to make gape holes in flat pieces of paper, the
spaces in a woven rug, locks of hair—anything, everything.*
I figure that since I snatched a starling from its nest, no matter how
unwanted it might have been in the larger scheme of things, I should give
that starling as good a life as it can have. The opportunity to investigate
the world by opening things with its bill is clearly a key to maintaining
all the elements of starling social intelligence: curiosity, involvement,
exploration, playfulness, mischief. To keep Carmen’s starling-faculties
sharp, I provide her with plenty of gaping opportunities throughout the
day. One of her favorite treats is applesauce, which I offer in a little dish
covered with foil. The thing about starlings is that when they are with
you, they don’t want to play with toys or eat things on their own; they
want to play and eat with you. So I hold Carmen’s applesauce in my hand
while she jumps on my thumb and pokes holes in the foil or lifts the
corners to get to the yummy fruit. Then I cover it up, and after a
disgruntled squawk, she does it again. I hide a grape in my fist so she has
to find it through my closed fingers. When she does, she eats the grape
by opening it with her gaping motion though the hole on top, where the
stem was, rather than pecking at it. I give her toys that she can gape into
—origami cranes, sponges, snail shells. I cover the bottom of her aviary
with multiple layers of newspaper so she can lift and explore them,
opening the folds, making little tents, and crawling beneath them,
sometimes to my great distress—where has she gone? When I call
“Carmen,” she peeks out one side, as playful as a puppy.
 Carmen gaping for applesauce. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

I love introducing this goofy, pretty, smart bird to my friends, knowing

that she brings to everyone, as she has to me, a renewed sense of the raw
beauty and intelligence in all of life, accessible only when we are able to
strip away our preconceptions. “I hate starlings,” a guest will tell me. I
let Carmen out of her aviary. She lights on my hand, stands in her
shining feathers, and sweetly tilts her head. And I ask my guest, “Do you
hate this starling?”
For perspective, I contemplate Mozart, who lived more than a
hundred years before starlings had been purposely introduced anywhere,
at a time when the human relationship to nature was a subject of
philosophical and literary thought but long before anyone had an inkling
that ecology would become a subject of study. Mozart lived in a place
where starlings were native and thus valued as a providential part of the
natural world, a place where their beauty was admired and their voices
were appreciated. Even today, starlings are valued in Europe, where their
numbers are declining due to the loss of agricultural lands. In England
and other parts of Europe, this decline has even led to worry over the
birds’ welfare—they are officially listed as a species of concern.
Mozart’s relationship to Star, and that of the friends he introduced to the
bird, were unclouded by a hovering hatred for the species.
 The place we are left to inhabit in our thinking about starlings is a
complicated one, but one that we are equal to. Carmen and her kin invite
us to experience the poetic dissonance and multilayered understanding
that is one of the hallmarks of our creative human intelligence. Starlings
are shimmering, plain, despised, charming, collectively devastating,
individually fascinating. We have the capacity to realize that while a
species may be ecologically undesirable, the individuals of the species
are just birds. Beautiful, conscious, intelligent in their own right.
Innocent. Do I want starlings gone? Erased from the face of North
America? Yes, unequivocally. Do I resent them as aggressive invaders?
Of course. And do I love them? Their bright minds, their sparkling
beauty, their unique consciousness, their wild starling voices? Their
feathers, brown from one angle, shining from another? Yes, yes, I do.
“There is another world,” Paul Éluard wrote, “but it is in this one.”*
One world is marked by a bland forgetfulness, where we do not permit
ourselves an openness to the simple, graced beauty that is always with
us. The other is marked by attentiveness, aliveness, love. This is the state
of wonder, which is commonly treated as a passive phenomenon—a kind
of visitation or feeling that overcomes us in the face of something
wondrous. But the ground of the word, the Old English wundrian, is very
active, meaning “to be affected by one’s own astonishment.” We decide,
moment to moment, if we will allow ourselves to be affected by the
presence of this brighter world in our everyday lives. Certainly we get no
encouragement from what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the “overculture.”
It cannot be assessed by the standardized cultural criteria of worth—
measures that can be labeled with a sum or a statistic or even, perhaps, a
word. Receptivity to wonder is not economically productive, marketable,
quantifiable. The rewards, also, stand beyond such calculation. But it is
in such receptivity that we discover what draws us, and along with it our
originality, our creativity, our soulfulness, our gladness, our art. Mozart
found inspiration in the presence of a common bird. For us, too, the song
of the world so often rises in places we had not thought to look.
 Four

WHAT THE STARLING SAID

HIieeeiEEeee. Carmen’s first word was wobbly and uncertain. But it

was a word. She’d said “Hi.” Right? Hadn’t she? Tom and I looked at
each other, neither of us wanting to be the one to suggest that a random
warbling was an intentionally formed humanlike sound produced by our
four-month-old starling chick. But then she said it again, clear as the
bright August sky. HIiiiiiiii. Hi. Hi. Tom and I grabbed hands and
jumped up and down. “Hi!” we sang back. “Hi, Carmen!” Our baby had
said her first word! We ran up to Carmen’s aviary and peered inside. “Hi,
Carmen!” She hopped over to see us, turned her head as if to listen, and
—as she always would in the future when we tried to get her to talk on
request—fell completely silent. But as soon as we returned to the
kitchen: Hiii! We looked back at her. Was she mocking us? Most likely
not. She was just enjoying her new way of expressing herself, one that
would become, far more than any of us could have imagined, an integral
part of the life of our household.
It is a surprise to most contemporary Americans that starlings can
talk, that they are gifted mimics of environmental sounds, other birds,
music, and the human voice. In this they surpass crows and ravens and
are on par with birds of the parrot family. But the fact of starling
mimicry was common knowledge in other times and places. Shakespeare
clearly expected his sixteenth-century audiences, a hundred and seventy
years before Mozart, to understand the reference in Henry IV that
inspired Eugene Schieffelin’s Central Park starling introductions: “I’ll
have a starling shall be taught to speak.” Most of Shakespeare’s audience
were not aristocratic, or particularly literary, or even educated, yet if they
had not known that starlings could talk, the plot point would have made
no sense. And such knowledge is older still. In the first century, the
Roman author, military commander, and natural philosopher Pliny the
Elder raised starlings for study and recorded that Julius Caesar, among
other early statesmen, also kept them and taught them to “parle Greek
and Latin.” Disastrously for the starlings, it was believed in sixteenth-
century Britain that if one used a silver sixpence to slit a starling’s
tongue, the bird could be taught to speak more impressively.

Soon after the Hi, we realized that, although Carmen had formed her first
human word, it had not been her first act of mimicry. A couple of weeks
earlier she had started making an odd sound, one we hadn’t heard from
her before and that wasn’t in the innate starling repertoire of whistles and
squawks that she was perfecting in her spare time. It was a quick up and
down, an EEE-oo-EEE-oo-EE-oo. Three or four like that, in rapid
succession. It sounded to me a little like the song of a common yellow-
throated warbler, a bird that Carmen had never heard. Then, just a few
nights after the Hi, I had poured myself a little glass of chardonnay and
was using the Vacu Vin (the plastic pump apparatus that sucks the extra
air out of a wine bottle through a rubber stopper) when I heard it: EE-oo-
EE-oo-EE-oo! I stood, mouth agape, until I recovered enough to yell,
“Tom! Tom, Tom, Tom!” He came running. “Listen!” And just as I
started to lift the pump, Carmen joined in—Vacu Vin and starling almost
indistinguishable. I’m sure this reflects poorly on me somehow; the first
repetitive environmental noise my starling learned to mimic was the
sound of me hitting the bottle!
Her vocabulary grew quickly over the next several months. Other
than the initial hi greeting, we chose in the main not to attempt to teach
Carmen particular words but to let her vocalizations unfold in tune with
her life within our family. Constant favorites are Hi, Carmen; Hi, honey;
and C’mere!—the short phrases we utter every day as we pass by her
aviary or when we open the hatch and call her over to land on our
shoulders. She is good at the kissy sound humans use when calling an
animal—she makes three in a row, just as we do with her. Sometimes,
when she’s not trying very hard, she sounds shrill and starling-ish when
she imitates human words. Sometimes she sounds just like a feathery
little person.
Meanwhile, Carmen continued to expand her household-sound
repertoire. After the wine vacuum came the coffee grinder. Then the
beeping of the microwave oven—pitch perfect. She integrated all of
these sounds, as well as Kiss me! and C’mere! and Hi, honey, into her
rambling song bouts. She would also often make the sounds individually,
just calling them out one at a time and at random, or so I thought at first.
It took me far too long—and I feel quite stupid about this—to notice
something else, something startling and beautiful.
Carmen imitates the coffee grinder—an unpleasantly loud but
accurate Whirrrraaaaah!—when I open the jar of coffee beans and pour
them into the machine. Every evening I walk into the kitchen to grind the
beans for the next morning. There is Carmen, eager to announce, first,
the Ker-klunk of the coffee-jar lid as I set it on the counter, then
Whiirrraaah! When I open the microwave door, she immediately
interjects her eerily mechanical Beep! Beep-beep! And the wine-vacuum
sound? When she hears the clink of the bottle.
All of this made me realize that, like these household sounds, the
words she imitates are not called out at random. When I come downstairs
in the morning, it is not the microwave or the kissing sounds I hear first,
but the greeting—Hi, Carmen! Hi, Carmen! Hi, Carmen!—the first
words I say to her each day. And when I stop to peek into her aviary?
C’mere. All participatory, anticipatory, all involved, all cognizant of
what is going on aurally in her world and what precipitates what. She is
basically saying, I know what’s going on! I am part of this! I am filled
with wonder. And with questions.
Meredith West is an ethologist emeritus at Indiana University and the
lead author of an iconic 1990 Scientific American paper that explored the
subject of Mozart’s starling and the relational capacities of starling pets.
It was West’s paper that confirmed for me that the story I’d heard about
Mozart’s pet was indeed based in fact, and her work brought to light the
details of Mozart’s notebook for an English-speaking audience. She also
kept starlings in her home so she could understand how Mozart fell for
such a bird. But the heart of West’s work is really the aural complexity of
starling vocalizations and the character of communication possible
between starlings and humans. According to West, the vocal interaction
we experience with Carmen is typical; West refers to it as a kind of
social sonar or echolocation: starlings toss out sounds to see what comes
back to them. Where for a bat the reward of echolocation is a meal of
mosquitoes, for a starling the reward appears to be a sense of comfort in
belonging. Carmen’s verbal and aural participation is a way of locating
herself in her surroundings, which for a starling are not just physical but
also social. Response from the world around her is essential.

In 1983, Meredith West and her colleagues carried out a pioneering study
on starling mimicry. Seven starlings were captured as five-day-old
nestlings, just like Carmen; four were females and three were males.
West’s chicks were all hand-raised together in the lab until they were
about thirty days old, at which point they were split into three groups.
Each group went to live in a household with human caretakers, but all
under different circumstances. A male and a female went to live in a
home where, like Carmen, they were raised with constant human contact
and treated as part of the family; they were often let out to fly free, were
fed by hand, and were included in group conversations. They were sung
to and whistled to. There was no attempt to teach the birds particular
words or songs or to mimic any sounds that the starlings made except
when doing so came naturally. Another male and female went to a home
where the humans didn’t interact with them at all except for what little
was necessary to keep them fed and their enclosures clean.
The last three birds went to live together on a screened porch in the
same home as the first pair of birds, those that were living as part of a
family. These screened-off birds could hear everything that the inside
birds heard—the human voices, the singing, the vacuum cleaner—but
people in the home didn’t approach them, talk to them as individuals, or
handle them.
It turns out that among starlings that live with humans, Carmen is not
alone in her eagerness to join the household’s conversation. In West’s
study, all seven of the birds mimicked natural sounds, mechanical sounds
in their environment, and other birds. But only the birds that interacted
closely with humans mimicked human words and voices, and only these
birds mimicked environmental sounds in the context of what their human
caretakers were doing. West and the other starling-keepers in her study
reported that their birds kept them constantly on their toes, readily
mimicking a variety of sounds, most commonly greetings and good-byes
(Hi, Good morning, Hey, buddy, Night-night, Go to your cage);
attributions (Silly bird, You’re so pretty, See you soon, baboon, You’re
kidding!); conversational fragments (Whatcha doing, Okay, I guess so,
This is Mrs. Struthers calling); and household noises (cat meowing, dog
barking, door squeaking, keys rattling, dishes clinking). Many people
who live with starlings report becoming self-conscious about tics they
never knew they had until their starlings mimicked them back: sighing,
coughing, sniffing, tongue-clicking, odd little laughs. In Meredith West’s
academic household, a resident starling would perch on the professor’s
shoulder and mutter, Basic research, it’s true, I guess that’s right, and
when someone else walked into the room, the bird would announce, I
have a question! The implication is that mimicry has a rich and complex
social aspect—that it’s valuable and useful for starlings to connect
aurally with those they are most closely bonded to, whether that is
another starling or a human.
West and her team also found that the family-raised birds imitated the
cadence of human speech whether they were forming recognizable
words or not, just like a human baby starts to sound like it is making
words before it actually is—the bird version of baby talk. Carmen does
this all the time. She will be rattling away, whistling and gurgling like a
wild starling, and I’ll look at her and say, “What is all this noise?” She’ll
stop the starling talk, tilt her head, and say with a perfect American
English lilt, Why, it’s nothing. Say, that soup on the stove smells
delicious. Why don’t you let me out and we’ll have a nice game of
backgammon while it simmers. She doesn’t produce the actual words, of
course, just the up-and-down cadence and intonation, almost exactly like
my own.
It’s the same as a person imitating French or Chinese or some other
language that they don’t actually speak; it is easy to guess what language
is being imitated even though the words are nonsense. When my family
was over this holiday season, they kept telling me, “Carmen said, ‘Merry
Christmas!’ I heard her!” She didn’t, but you could imagine it. She was
just baby-talking household English. (And let me offer a piece of advice:
never teach a starling to say “Merry Christmas” unless you want to hear
it all year long.) Birds raised within earshot of humans but without close
contact do not behave this way. Carmen’s vocalizations are relational, a
kind of conversation. They are her way of being with us.
It’s kind of unnerving, actually, to be sitting alone in the living room
on a dark rainy night, cuddled down by the fire with a book, and hear a
little voice from the next room say with perfect inflection, C’mere! She
sounds so hopeful, I can’t help getting up and walking over. “Here I am.”
Carmen jumps to the front perch, puts her face to the wire, and we touch,
nose to bill. “Go to sleep,” I tell her, and turn out all the lights.*

All of this makes me ponder the aural relationship between Mozart and
Star. By Mozart’s time, the keeping and training of birds with good
singing voices had become common among the European middle and
upper classes, aristocracy, and even royalty. In the early 1700s, royal
Parisian “supervisor of the woods” Hervieux de Chanteloup had a second
job description: “guardian of the princess’s canary birds.” Most in
demand were the bird species with vocal agility: canaries, bullfinches,
linnets, East Indian nightingales (actually a kind of mynah), and
starlings.
Little eight-holed bird flutes called flageolets became popular among
those with the leisure to train their birds in song, a fashionable hobby.
(Mozart would absolutely have known about this trend, but it is unlikely
that, as a professional composer with a houseful of fine instruments, he
would have deigned to purchase one of the popular flutes.) In 1717, The
Bird Fancyer’s Delight was published in London, a slender book of tunes
“properly compos’d within the compass and faculty of each bird,” with a
few tunes for each of eleven species, including three for the starling.
The pieces for starlings in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight are decidedly
un-starling-esque, composed in a straight G major or F major and rolling
along prettily and predictably, with no flights of starling fancy whatever.
I have performed them for Carmen on various instruments—violin,
piano, harp—and asked my daughter to play them on Carmen’s favorite
instrument, the cello. Carmen does what she always does when we play
music for her: she tilts her head attentively, and curiously. She is, as ever,
a good listener. When music she loves comes on the stereo or is
performed live on one of the household instruments, she sings along
exuberantly. But with these tunes, she offers nothing more than a polite
little squeak here and there, and perhaps a perfunctory whistle and wing
fluff. She is unimpressed.
I can’t imagine that eighteenth-century starlings would have
displayed any more interest in The Bird Fancyer’s Delight than Carmen
does, but bullfinches proved to be apt pupils of the tunes and learned
their songs readily. Bullfinches are fat, handsome little birds topped with
oil-black caps and gray backs that are set off against unusual persimmon-
colored breasts. In Germany, bullfinches were captured in groups and
taught to sing for show and for sale. The popular method of professional
bird trainers was to keep the young birds in complete silence and
darkness, often without food, so their senses would be formed by nothing
but the tutored tunes. Some trainers even blinded their birds with hot
metal spikes. This kind of “music by torture,” as composer David
Rothenberg called it in his excellent Why Birds Sing, was often
successful with the gifted bullfinches. William Cowper’s 1788 poem “On
the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s Bullfinch” attests:

And though by nature mute,

Or only with a whistle blessed,
Well-taught, he all the sounds expressed
Of flageolet or flute.

Those that survived the abuse and sang well commanded high prices
in the shops. Star, worth just a few kreuzer with his bits of mimicked
motifs, would have been considered a musical hack by comparison. At
least at first glance.

Among the birds commonly kept for song, only the starlings and mynahs
were true mimics. It’s an important distinction. Most songbirds possess
an inherited ability to learn the songs unique to their own species,
usually sung by the male, most often during breeding season. This spring
song is a proclamation of breeding readiness, and a strong, exuberant
song helps to attract a mate and declare and defend a nesting territory. If
you take a walk in the woods with a good birder in the right season, she
will be able to announce the identity of the birds singing high and
invisibly in the leafy trees based solely on their song. Most passerines
learn their species’ song when they are young, so they are ready for the
breeding season the year after their birth. In the autumn we can hear the
young males of vocal species like house finches or white-crowned and
white-throated sparrows singing wobbly versions of their songs—
beginning practice for the spring. Sweet sounds. And for most of these
birds, there is a learning window; if they do not learn their species’ songs
in the first year or so of life, they are unlikely to learn them at all. Some
birds raised in captivity will be able to sing a version of their species’
song, usually not a very good one, but many need the live tutoring they
receive in the wild from older males. And if captive birds are introduced
to another song instead of their own species’ song during this sensitive
song-learning window, some will learn that song instead, which means
that for some species, the song is learned rather than innate. These birds
have an inherited tendency to learn the song they are exposed to most
often when very young, just as the trained pet bullfinches did, as long as
it is in the vocal range of their usual species’ song.
This is very different from the true mimicry we see in starlings.
Mimics do sing a song unique to their species (in the case of the starling,
this includes a long series of teakettle whistles, clattering, and shrieks
that many are reluctant to term a song). But true mimics like starlings do
something else too: they imitate sounds from their environment—novel
and improbable sounds that lie far outside of the usual explanation for
birdsong. They appear to select these sounds at will; we can attempt to
teach starlings sounds and tunes, and they will turn their nose up at some
and latch onto others. They are mysteriously discerning and certainly
have no regard for what we want them to mimic. Meredith West thought
her birds had failed to learn anything from words and songs she’d played
them on cassette tapes until she discovered one of them mimicking the
hissss of the recording tape between phrases.
This kind of true mimicry is uncommon. Passerine mimics include
the starlings and mynahs, the corvids (jays, ravens, magpies, crows), and
mockingbirds. Outside of the passerines, parrots are the most famous and
gifted mimics. All these birds will imitate other birds and animals,
environmental sounds, musical motifs, and human voices. While a young
bullfinch can learn to sing a song in its impressive native range, unlike a
mimic, it cannot imitate random and novel phrases.
Mimicry indicates a sophistication in relationship to sound and
involves a plasticity of behavior and consciousness that goes far beyond
the instinctive. New research at Duke University suggests that the brains
of parrots display a unique genetic pattern. The area of the brain
associated with vocalization is surrounded by another layer, or shell, of
ultra-specialized neurons for sound recognition and creation—a “song
system within a song system,” as the researchers put it. This may be true
for the brains of non-parrot mimics as well.

Humans, ever self-absorbed, homed in on the capacity of certain birds to

imitate our own speech right away, and it became one of the first areas of
avian vocal research. Pliny the Elder kept magpies alongside his
starlings. He noticed how eager the birds were to learn new words and
how, once fixed on a word, they would work and fuss over it until it was
perfected. Carmen certainly does this. One of the first phrases she chose
to mimic among those oft heard in our home was Hi, honey! The word
honey came out rickety and birdish and strange for days, but she’d turn it
over and over on her tongue. And when she had it? She proclaimed it
loudly and, to all appearances, even joyfully—not shyly, as when she
was still perfecting the sound. Pliny declared that a magpie who has
trouble learning a word will suffer such angst over his failure that he will
die of it! He mused wonderfully: “They get fond of uttering particular
words, and not only learn them but love them and secretly ponder them
with careful reflection, not concealing their engrossment.… It is an
established fact that if the difficulty of a word beats them this causes
their death.” Secretly pondering? Perhaps. But Carmen, I hope, is not so
angst-ridden.
In spite of Pliny’s early start on the subject, and even after centuries
of study, mimicry in birds is little understood. No single theory applies
for all birds, and there are elements of mimicry that defy explanation
altogether. The classic theory with starlings is that males use mimicry in
the main to impress females. As a female starling, Carmen is not
supposed to be a gifted mimic or songster. But living with a female
starling, I can heartily attest that they create many of the same song
elements that males do, and obviously they can be capable mimics. I was
shocked and alarmed, though, when in April of Carmen’s first year of
life she stopped vocalizing. Completely. She didn’t just stop the
incessant whistles and the Hi, Carmens and C’meres. It was every single
little peep. I freaked out. I coddled her, sang to her, exhorted Claire to set
up her cello next to Carmen’s aviary and play her favorite Bach suites,
with which she had always loved to sing along. Nothing. While I fretted
about how I had failed as a starling-keeper, I developed two theories.
First, I thought that as a social bird, Carmen might be depressed in her
life without starling companionship, that maybe her vocal and social
skills had slowly been withering away and I was too dull to notice until
she stopped talking altogether. I continued to spend extra time with her,
added more mirrors to her habitat so she could keep company with her
own image when alone, played tapes of starling vocalizations, and left
her listening to her favorite bluegrass music when I had to leave.
Nothing. Not one little tweet. She was as friendly and tame as ever, but
she didn’t make a sound for nearly three whole months.
During this time, I worked out my second theory. This was the season
that, were she not living in a house, Carmen would have been nesting.
Even though she had no mate, no nest, not even an artificial nest box,
and even though she did not lay eggs, she might still have been
overcome with the biological imperative to keep her nonexistent nest and
nestlings safe by remaining absolutely quiet. Her mate, if she’d had one,
would accomplish the necessary scolding and chest puffing required to
guard the nest from interlopers or predators. Her job was to be silent and
still.
I granted that this was a more likely hypothesis, but it still seemed
improbable. She was so far removed from the nesting process, why
would this one behavioral imperative take over? And yet, why should it
be any different from the other physiological changes associated with the
seasons that she was displaying? Her legs became lighter pink, her bill
changed from dark to bright golden yellow—both signs of breeding
readiness. Perhaps this silence was simply seasonal? I did what I always
do when Carmen’s behavior baffles me: I threw binoculars around my
neck, grabbed a notebook, and headed out into the field—in this case,
my urban neighborhood—to see what the wild starlings were up to. Sure
enough, the male birds were in full-voiced territorial glory, and the
females were hidden in their nests, silent as stones. This gave me modest
hope.
Finally, in July, just when I was beginning to despair of ever hearing
her voice again, I padded down to make my morning coffee and heard
Hi, honey! “Carmen!” I ran over to her aviary, but she was nonchalant, as
if nothing had ever been amiss. Then she broke into a long, discordant
whistle, and over the next few days she returned to her full, spirited
voice. This was just when her brood of nonexistent chicks would be
fledged and gone, giving her no further need to be secretive and hiding.
If you look into starling-vocalization research, you’ll find papers with
titles like “Temporal and Sequential Organization of Song Bouts in the
Starling.” This one describes the function of mimicry as purely mate
attraction and makes no mention whatever of female voices; every single
bird studied was male. Or there is “Song Acquisition in Sturnus vulgaris:
A Comparison of the Songs of Live-Tutored, Tape-Tutored, Untutored,
and Wild-Caught Males.” Males. The study methods make sense; in
most passerine species, while females make various chips and calls, it is
the males that do all the true singing, so naturally the study of singing
starlings has focused on males during their peak singing time—spring
and summer, the months that, as Carmen taught me, female starlings go
silent. No wonder the females’ vocal capacity is not just underestimated,
but almost entirely unknown.
I spoke to Meredith West about the skewed view of female starling
voices. Her study was unique in that more than half the birds involved
were female. This was just the luck of the draw—it’s hard to sex baby
starlings, and they took what they got. In the end, this was fortunate.
While it wasn’t something West set out to prove, her work uncloaked the
extraordinary vocal prowess of female starlings. She agreed with my
finding that female starlings could be as vocal and gifted mimics as
males, especially when they are in a social group (like a family) with
whom they want to interact.
Both male and female starlings invite researchers to expand on the
classic explanation for mimicry. Sure, there is a role in pair-bonding, and
males do seem to take the lead in using mimicry to attract a mate. But
once the pair bond is secure, mimicry on both sides appears to be a way
of maintaining intimacy between mates. Through the seasons of the year,
mimicry continues in both sexes, even though males and females often
split into separate flocks; it’s a form of connection and belonging among
flock-mates, of environmental awareness and participation. I am certain
that there is more going on with both male and female starling
communication and consciousness than we realize, but so much of this
understanding cannot be learned in the lab, or even in the field, where we
experience the habits of starlings in fits and starts. It can be learned only
by the rare privilege of living in constant contact with a wild bird.

Carmen fluffed after a bath and surveying her world. (Photograph by Tom
Furtwangler)

Just recently Carmen added a new trick: meowing like the cat. Delilah
appeared entirely unamused. Tom, Claire, and I all looked at one another,
and Claire sighed. “It was bound to happen.” From the next room, we
can’t tell the two apart. Delilah’s food bowl is near Carmen’s aviary.
Unfortunately, this means that the meow Carmen has learned is not some
sweet, purry, happy meow, but a crabby-cat Feed me! meow, the one our
fat Delilah makes while circling her bowl, announcing her firm belief
that it is mealtime. As usual with a new sound, Carmen worked on it,
perfected it, and then mixed it into her repertoire—those bouts of singing
where she throws all the mimicked sounds she knows into one long
string. She would, as she did with other sounds, single out the meow and
call it at seemingly random moments. And, also as usual, she did
something else that took us way too long to comprehend.
Tom noticed it first. He walked into the kitchen and Carmen looked at
him and said, Hi, Carmen! Then Delilah walked in, and Carmen looked
at her and said, Meow! At first we thought it had to be chance, but it has
happened too many times, too consistently. Carmen greets us, human and
cat, each in our own language.
Carmen has learned that Hi, Carmen is a greeting, and she uses it as
one. But what about that C’mere? This phrase, in the context of
Carmen’s life, usually means we are going to hang out together. I open
her cage, say, “Come here,” and hold out my hand. What about those
times that I am in the next room, and I hear her call, C’mere? Is it a
signal of desire? Does she want me to come there? I would not suggest
that she has any sense of the grammatical structure of the words, or even
that she recognizes them as words, as compared to environmental
sounds. But given what else she has taught me about the way that
starlings understand context, it is altogether possible that she has learned
the cause-and-effect relationship between the sound of C’mere and the
result—my presence, her favorite thing.
I realize that this might sound far-fetched. We are talking about a
bird, and such complexity of consciousness exceeds what we typically
imagine birds to be capable of. But really, what I am suggesting is
analogous to the dog who carries its leash over to its person and looks up
expectantly. Leash equals hope of a walk. Why couldn’t Carmen’s
C’mere not equal the hope of Lyanda coming over to the aviary? This
question presses the boundaries of what we know about avian
consciousness and human-bird communication, yes, but it is past time for
such pressing. For so long, birdsong has been considered a function of
breeding and territoriality. But the earth and its beings are extravagantly
wild, full of unexpected wonders. It is time to turn from our textbooks
and listen to the birds themselves.
Carmen’s influence on my never-ending life pilgrimage in the natural
world is profound. I find that when I walk into the world these days, I
cannot help but say “Hi” to the starlings I see, and all the other birds too.
I am so accustomed to Carmen’s friendliness, I almost expect that one of
them will fly to my shoulder and say Hi back. Writing on her blog Myth
and Moor, author, artist, and folklorist Terri Windling reminds us, “Many
an old story begins with the words, ‘Long ago, when animals could
speak…,’ invoking a time when the boundary lines between the human
and the animal worlds were less clearly drawn than they are today, and
more easily crossed.” Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an
opening for a tale; not “Long ago, when animals could speak,” but “Long
ago, when people could listen.” I look back to my naive early notion that
I would obtain a starling to study in support of my own ideas, the story I
thought I wanted to tell. But when I manage to hush my own voice and
just listen, I discover that Carmen has become not just part of the story,
but the storyteller, whispering in my ear, telling me what needs to be
written, to be spoken, to be sung into the world.
 Five

THE STARLING OF VIENNA

When Carmen was young—able to fly but still fat and gray-feathered
—she used to explore our house courageously. She’d fly around every
room and liked to sit high atop bookshelves, or lamps, or chandeliers,
surveying the scene. Nowadays she will come when she’s called—or
sometimes she will, anyway. I’ll hold out an arm and call her name, and
though she will ponder for a moment whether or not to do as she’s asked,
she will most often decide in my favor. Baby Carmen did no such thing.
As songbirds feather out, bits of downiness remain here and there
among the new feathers, and the last of this to fall away is the one little
tuft over each eye. A bit of downy fluff sticks out there, like an old
man’s eyebrows, giving the young birds a half-adorable, half-grumpy
look. Carmen, with her brows fluttering, would gaze down at me from
the top of some high cupboard when it was time for her to go in for the
night. I’d hold up my arm hopelessly. “Come on, Carmen! Come on
down!” She’d just look sweetly about, as young birds do. Finally I would
pull over a stool and risk my life climbing sock-footed onto the counter.
When I held my hand close to Carmen, she’d happily hop on.
Our house was built in the 1920s. Its most prominent features are
wide fir moldings and high airy ceilings. The floor plan is circular;
kitchen to hall to living room to dining room to mudroom, and back to
kitchen again, with wide archways between each room. When Carmen
was just beginning to fly, I’d help her practice by running in circles
around the main floor. She would follow me, flying behind like a little
kite. When she (or I) got tired, we’d take a break and she’d plop on my
shoulder for a rest. Then I’d start running again, and she’d leap back into
flight.
She used to fearlessly follow me everywhere. During my morning
shower, she would flit from the shower-curtain rod to the top of my head.
When I shampooed my hair, she would gape through my locks to explore
the suds, so I put a stop to this practice, worried that she was ingesting
soap.
Grown-up Carmen does none of these things. Young birds are sweetly
naive and open to exploring their world without caution. This is part of
why mortality is so high in the first months of a bird’s life. Adult birds
grow wise and more wary, for good reason.
The longer Carmen lives with us, the more she settles into a routine.
She is comfortable and unafraid in the kitchen, dining room, my study,
and of course her aviary. If I wander elsewhere in the house, she
becomes visibly nervous and will stick steadfastly to my shoulder.
Overall, though, I don’t see her as more fearful in life, but more tranquil.
I love to see that she has, in her way, made herself at home—made her
own home within our larger one, with her own paths and ways and
routines and places of comfort.
In my mind, Carmen’s unfolding story in our household—both
physical and aural—mingles constantly with the story of Mozart and
Star. I live with not just a wild bird, but Mozart’s bird. Every day I pick
up my pen and smile, just as Mozart did, at this starling’s iridescence, her
wildness, her chattering. I transport myself by the power of visualization
to the Mozarts’ home, where Star, like Carmen, would have settled in his
own way into their family routine. Even across the distance of time and
culture, Mozart’s life with Star and mine with Carmen surely share a
great deal. Yes, Mozart was a musical genius. But in the bare practical
outlines, we are two writers, sitting at our desks, with starlings on our
shoulders.
During the very first days that I started to wonder over the story of
Mozart and his starling, I began poring over guidebooks to Vienna and
Salzburg and treatises on the life and culture of these places. I tried to re-
create the streets that Mozart walked and the rooms where he lived with
Star in my mind’s eye. I am armed with a tenacious conviction that
somehow the presence of the people who live in a home resides in the
atmosphere of the walls forever. Although Carmen could teach me a
great deal about how anyone, including Mozart, would have lived with
such a unique bird, I knew that Mozart’s rooms held even more secrets.
Like so many Mozart pilgrims before me, I packed my bags for Vienna.
First, I would find the perfect Sacher torte. Then I would wander the
streets of the city and the halls of Mozart’s home.

It was September 29, 1784, when the young Mozart couple moved from
their cramped quarters on the Graben to sizable apartments on
Domgasse, just around the corner from the great spire of St. Stephen’s
Cathedral, Vienna’s beloved landmark, visible for miles around. In the
carriage, Star likely rode in a small cage alongside the Mozarts’
swaddled son, Carl Thomas, just nine days old. The weather was fair,
and in spite of the trouble of relocating with a newborn, Mozart and
Constanze were surely in good spirits. Their boy was rosy, and they were
moving to gorgeous third-floor apartments in a desirable neighborhood.
Besides, they had to travel only a few blocks, just a ten-minute walk
from their previous home, perhaps a few minutes longer in laden
carriages. Though the Mozarts moved frequently during their life
together in Vienna—fourteen apartments in just ten years—the home at
Domgasse is the only residence that still exists.*
Anyone seeking to understand this period of Viennese history and
culture is indebted to the rare, on-the-ground writings of cultural
commentator Johann Pezzl, who between 1786 and 1790 compiled some
of the only extant eyewitness cultural commentary on the place and time.
I studied his Vienna Sketches obsessively in the weeks before my
journey. Pezzl reports that the third floor (what Americans would call the
second floor, considered the third floor in Vienna, where the basement is
counted as floor one), although the most expensive, was by far the most
coveted—another reason the Mozarts were thrilled with their move. The
ground-level floor and the one above it were undesirable because of their
nearness to “dust from the street, the smells of stables and sewers, and
the noise of wheeled vehicles passing outside.” But once you got above
the third floor, rent became cheaper again, since, though the air and the
views were finer, “it is hard work carrying the necessities of life, wood,
water, etc. to these heavenly heights, and while the number of steps
brings a reduction in rent, it increased the price to be paid for delivery of
goods carried up 150 steps ten times a day.” Thus, “in the top floors of
city buildings, in garrets and in attics, nestle the poorest type of tailors,
copyists, gilders, music copyists, wood-carvers, painters, and so-on.”
Pezzl’s view is as political as it is colorful: “These attic floors are often
crawling with hordes of children, whose numbers and constant
requirements often worry the poor father to the same extent as the rich
and distinguished man living on the second floor below has his worries
about being able to find a sole heir for his family.”
In the fresh modern air, it is difficult to imagine the horrific dust in
the lives of all Mozart-era Viennese, which Pezzl describes as the
greatest of plagues. “It is the dried-out dust of chalk and gravel, it
irritates the eyes and causes all sorts of lung complaints. Servants,
runners, hairdressers, coachmen, soldiers, etc., who have to be out on the
streets a great deal, often die of pneumonia phthisis, consumption, chest
infections, etc.… The worst situation occurs when, after several warm
days, a strong wind springs up… the dust penetrates mouth, nose and
ears… and one’s eyes weep.” The Mozarts were better situated in these
apartments than we realize at first glance from our modern, dustless
vantage point. Above the dust, below the labor.
 Der Mehlmarkt in Wein, the center of Vienna in Mozart’s time. (Bernardo
Bellotto, 1760)

I visited Vienna and Salzburg in the autumn, just after the tourist season,
when crowds were smaller and prices were a bit lower, but the weather
would be—if all went well—still fine. Fortune smiled; my days in
Austria were warm and idyllic. Even today, overlaid with tourist-trade
Mozartian tchotchkes and chocolates, Vienna feels almost enchanted.
The musical soul of the city is palpable and true.
I like to fancy myself an easy traveler, open to the serendipity of a
journey, but on the streets of Vienna, I found myself, as I usually do in
such scenarios, clutching my Rough Guide like Lucy Honeychurch with
her Baedeker. The map within led me to the Mozarts’ Domgasse
apartments, now the Mozarthaus museum. Though Wolfgang and
Constanze loved these rooms, where they lived for almost three years,
they had to leave in 1787 because the rent was just too high. In the
decades that followed, there were various leaseholders, and, though no
one knows exactly when it happened, at some point the rooms were
subdivided into three smaller living spaces.
In 1941, Nazi politicians supervised the acquisition of the lease to one
of these smaller apartments and created a modest museum to
commemorate the 150th anniversary of Mozart’s death for the German
Reich’s Mozart Week in November of that year. Historian Erik Levi, in
his book Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural
Icon, explains that the Nazis were particularly keen to exploit this
anniversary, seeing the “universal accessibility” of Mozart’s music as an
“ideal emotional link between the home and the war front.” Ultimately,
Levi claims, Mozart was more difficult than many other popular
composers for the Nazis to colonize, as his philosophical and moral
outlooks, overtly at odds with their agenda, were so well recorded in his
many letters.
It wasn’t until 1976 that the City of Vienna acquired the lease to all of
the Domgasse rooms. The original layout was restored, and a simple
museum was set up. In the mid-1990s, the Wien Museum organization
hoped to attract more visitors by reinvigorating the presentation of
Mozart’s former residence. The rooms were primped, and scrubbed, and
instilled with a modern curatorial philosophy. Even so, the review in the
Rough Guide was unenthusiastic. I could not wait to see this house and
read over the pages dozens of times before my trip searching for a
glimmer of hope, but I found none. This is what the Rough Guide
reports:

Sadly… despite all the history, the museum is a bit disappointing.

A lift whisks you to the third floor, so you have to wade through
two floors of manuscript facsimiles and portraits before you reach
the apartment itself. Only one of Mozart’s rooms actually retains
the original decor of marble and stucco… and there are none of
Mozart’s personal effects and precious little atmosphere.

My other favorite guide, Rick Steves, did nothing to revive my

dwindling hope for this museum pilgrimage, which I had dreamed would
be the high point of my Viennese journey. Note that both reviews begin
with the same word:
 Sadly, visiting this museum is like reading a book standing up—
rather than turning pages, you walk from room to room. There are
almost no real artifacts.

Dear me. But I had traveled across the globe to research these very
quarters, to see how Wolfgang and Constanze made their life in Vienna
and how Star might have fit into it. I lifted my chin and stepped off the
narrow cobbled street, prepared to be underwhelmed.
Instead, I was transformed. Certainly the entrance is a bit sad. After a
promising approach through a marble archway, the place that horse-
drawn carriages would have deposited Mozartian visitors, the new
reception area evokes the lobby of a miniature strip-mall Cineplex. There
is flat gray carpet, a coatroom lined with cold metal hangers (complete
with a stern overseer demanding your wrap and bag), and a discouraging
coffee room with Ikea-style chairs and a vending machine. Not an inch
of charm in sight. But soon you take the stairs up and up, leaving the
modern carpet behind, until you are peering over a rail into the open
courtyard and then facing the servants’ door into the first room of the
Mozart home. The rooms and hallways have indeed been scoured,
painted, and made safe enough for toddlers of overprotective modern
tourists to wander the stairwells without getting their little heads stuck
between the iron rails. But the apartments themselves, the rooms in
which the family lived their daily round, are otherwise little changed
since Mozart’s time.
The critique of the museum in the Rough and other guidebooks
comes, I think, from the reasoning behind its curation. The accepted
standard when creating museums around the residences of famous artists
and composers has been to do up the rooms in the fashion of the time, to
create a memorial to the imagined life of the subject. If the original
furniture of the inhabitant is not extant (Mozart’s is not), then similar
period furniture or good reproductions are secured and placed in the
rooms as the curator surmises they might have been arranged by the
famous occupants. This is what we have come to expect and enjoy. The
more progressive curation philosophy at Mozarthaus revolves around an
admission that we don’t know for certain what function each room
served for the Mozart family. Instead of imposing their own, possibly
erroneous vision on an unsuspecting public, the curators take the
refreshingly modern approach of inviting visitors to join them in
imagining how the rooms might have been used. They speculate in the
commentary that is tacked to the walls, but the suggestions are full of
accompanying questions marks—“Question Mark by Way of Invitation,”
they call it: Study (?); Bedroom (?). Instead of certainty, we are offered a
moment of creative vision. Here, visitor, you stand in this room, in the
rustle of air carrying voices of the past, arias risen to the rafters. You are
here. What do you think?
In my opinion this is not at all boring. It is challenging, beautiful, and
alive. Wandering the rooms for hours, I felt that my own imagination
was carried away in just the right fashion—with an air of possibility that
would not have been attainable in a more traditional exhibit. For surely it
is the apartment itself and the whispering ghosts who reside here that are
the gem of the museum. And I realized with delight that the curator’s
approach mirrors the path of the story I am weaving around Mozart and
his starling, which comes to life in these rooms but must remain riddled
with essential question marks.
In each room there is placed just one period artifact suggestive of life
in the apartments. These are all eighteenth-century pieces, similar to the
Mozarts’ own, though none of them are original to the household. A
table in the probable parlor. A single fork in the kitchen. Meanwhile, an
artist has created miniature ivory-colored reproductions of all the
furniture known to have belonged to the Mozarts. These live in a model
of the house in the first room, the servants’ quarters, and we are invited
to look inside, to arrange the furniture in our mind’s eye. The design of
the furniture is mainly rococo and baroque, as middle-class families like
Mozart’s rarely had a house furnished entirely in the neoclassical style of
the time.
The museum curators offer another playful bit of whimsy on the wall
behind the furniture-filled dollhouse. A small shelf displays a set of tiny
statues representing the key characters in the household—Constanze,
Mozart, and Carl Thomas, and a crib holding baby Johann Thomas
Leopold, who was born at the apartment in October of 1786 and lived
just a few weeks. Each figure is formed in red or yellow resin and is
about as big as my thumb. To my great surprise and happiness, I found
statues not just of the humans of the household but also of the Mozarts’
little dog, Gauckerl, and a bird in a cage: Mozart’s starling. I leaned over
and peered excitedly at the little yellow bird. Admittedly, the statue does
not look much like a starling, but who cares? I was thrilled to see that
Star was not just my own idiosyncratic obsession but part of this modern
telling of Mozart’s story.
The professed purpose of the statuettes is to aid us in our imaginative
wandering through the apartment. In each room, the figurines of the
characters that were likely to have used it are placed in a row on a
narrow shelf alongside the curatorial commentary. Thus, Wolfgang and
Constanze stand in the parlor. The couple and both boys, who likely slept
in the same room with their parents, are in the small bedroom. Gauckerl
is pretty much everywhere. And Star? Visions of Carmen’s life in my
own home swirled through my imagination, and I felt as if this bird
figurine leapt from its shelf as a full-size starling and perched on my
shoulder. With this unusual guide, I wandered from room to room,
asking my question: Where did you fly?

I started in the servants’ quarters, where cleaning supplies, firewood, and

the maid’s bed were likely kept; the room is narrow but bright. It is
unclear where Mozart’s manservant, Joseph, would have slept, though he
surely lived with the family. It is possible that he unrolled a mattress in
the hallway or kitchen at night and rolled it back up during the day (in
this he would have fared better than the other servants and even the
family in winter, as his bed would have been nearest the woodstove, the
warmest place and only source of heat in the freezing-cold house). This
was the Enlightenment, not an episode of Downton Abbey. Even in the
richest households, a family’s relationship with the servants was more
casual than it was in those post-Edwardian times, or in the Victorian era,
still a hundred years away. The original kitchen was long ago demolished
to allow for a central elevator—not for the exhibit, but for the modern
residents who inhabit the other apartments. The rest of the building, in
fact, still fulfills its original function; several families live upstairs in the
four-hundred-year-old rooms above the exhibits.
After you pass through the servants’ room (period item: portable
wrought-iron candlestick), a small dining room (porcelain fruit dish), and
what was likely a sort of guest room (simple wooden chair), the
apartment opens out into the largest and sunniest space on the floor,
probably the salon. The curators have placed a gaming table from
Mozart’s time in the center of this room, since a full-size billiards table
would have been too large, though Mozart loved the game. This is likely
the room where parties, dances, and musical performances were held,
with chairs rearranged for guests and musicians to suit the occasion.
The rooms progress in a kind of L shape, and at the far end of the
apartment is the door to a small bedroom with a window that looks out
on the cathedral spire. The ceiling is layered with thick, carved, gilded
stucco—coils of flowers and fleurs-de-lis and cherubs better suited to an
aristocratic mansion than these middle-class rooms. In the 1720s, the
apartment was owned by master stucco artist Albert Camesina, who
worked for the imperial court, and it was he who added this exquisite
ceiling. Stucco workers of Camesina’s caliber were not considered
simple builders; they were well respected as skilled artisans. (In Mozart’s
time, the apartment was called Camesina House; later, it was known as
Figaro House in honor of the famous opera that was composed under its
roof.) In my imagination it was this ceiling that sealed Mozart’s delight
in these lodgings. He could lie on his back and let the music in his mind
and the stresses on his nerves melt into the imagery over his head. There
he felt calm, bohemian, and a little rich.
I had been searching the tiny groupings of statuettes expectantly as I
explored each room. But after the suggestion of Star’s existence at the
very beginning and the promise that we would see the figurines
throughout the exhibit, there were no further bird statuettes. I queried the
docent, who laughed good-naturedly but did not seem to share my
wondering over the bird. (Later, I called the historical society. Where
might the bird’s cage have been? No one was willing to venture a guess.)
Eventually I came to the final room. Between the parlor and the little
bedroom is an expansive Study (?). Surely it was. Airy, light-filled, with
space for a grand piano, violin, viola, and the traipsings of children,
servants, students, musicians, dog. This was the perfect working room.
And it was here that the ghost-bird on my shoulder finally fluffed his
shining feathers.
In order to give Carmen the most time possible outside her enclosure, I
typically bring her up to my writing studio while I work. This takes some
preparation. I close the high windows, of course. Then I hide anything
that I don’t want to be nibbled, poked, stolen, thrashed, tromped on, or
pooped upon. If it is winter, I turn off the radiator and cover it with a
blanket so Carmen doesn’t land on it and burn her delicate little feet.
(Foot injury or infection is a common cause of death among captive
birds, and foot health is something I watch in Carmen carefully,
providing her with natural perches of varied width and roughness.) Once
the room is ready, I place a fresh paper towel within reach (to swiftly
wipe up pooplets), lock Delilah in Claire’s room, then go down to open
Carmen’s aviary so she can fly to my shoulder and hitch a ride back up
the stairs. Since reaching her wary adulthood, she has become suspicious
of the stairwell, so I walk slowly and whisper calming sentiments as we
climb. Once inside my studio, she is comfortable. This is her favorite
room. So much to do! So many ways to pester me!
Carmen will set immediately to her computer work. She loves to ride
on my hands while I type, but more than this, she loves to flap, jump,
and scamper across the keyboard. She tries to wedge her bill between the
keys and the board, another example of the gaping behavior she uses to
explore her world, and I worry that one day she will actually pop a key
off or electrocute herself. It is difficult to believe that her computer play
is all chance. She adds letters to documents, amends e-mails, erases e-
mails, and sends e-mails before they are finished. She “likes” Facebook
posts. Occasionally, her editing has improved a sentence, deleting one of
the superfluous adverbs to which I am prone. Sometimes I stop to watch
the movement of her rainbow-tinted feathers and her smart glistening
eyes. After a minute she turns to look at me, as if to say, Ahem! More
typing, please! How am I supposed to spoil your pitiful attempt to work if
you won’t even do anything?
 Carmen oversees the writing of Mozart’s Starling. (Photograph by Tom
Furtwangler)

Once Carmen tires of the computer, she turns to her second favorite
form of studio play: finding something that is dangerous and stealing it.
Somehow she intuits immediately when I want to take away an item that
she has made her plaything, and when I reach for it, she will fly
tauntingly out of reach. I have learned that when she finds pushpins,
thumbtacks, rubber bands, or other things that could kill her if she
decides to swallow them, my best strategy is reverse psychology. I affect
perfect nonchalance, then pretend interest in a different shiny little
object, something harmless, perhaps a large, unswallowable paper clip.
When Carmen flies over to investigate, I cover it up and tell her she can’t
have it. This will almost always inspire her to toss away the death-
thumbtack and try to grab the paper clip. She’ll peck at my fingers,
wedge her bill between my knuckles to force them apart while
squawking angrily, C’mere, c’mere! until she claims her prize (she
always mimics when harried). If I pretend I want the paper clip back,
she’ll take it away and guard it.
To keep Carmen safely occupied, I have made a little toy box for her
in my studio, as I did for Claire when she was a toddler. Carmen’s is
more of a toy bowl, really. It is filled with her favorite things: paper
clips, binder clips, hair ties, sticky notes of various sizes and colors,
buttons, a crinkly chocolate wrapper, a peanut in its shell, a teabag with
string and tag. Every day I renew my vain hope that she will occupy
herself with these things while I get some writing done. But the issue
with Carmen is that she doesn’t want to just play with these things, she
wants to play with them with me. They must sit on my desk, right at my
elbow where she can choose one and “kill” it by shaking it back and
forth, then thwacking it brutally against the desktop, a behavior she has
exhibited since she was very young; she especially likes to attack scraps
of paper in this way. I kept this in mind as I studied wild starlings
outdoors and saw the behavior duplicated when birds captured insects,
especially ones with large wings, like dragonflies or moths. The starlings
would brandish their bugs and bash them against the ground until the
wings were mostly shaken off, then they would eat the bodies of their
now-wingless delicacies. (Carmen has never had the chance to catch
anything with elaborate wings, like a moth or a butterfly, but if a little
bug flies near her, I am shocked at how lightning fast she can catch it and
swallow it down. She is, always, a wild bird.) Once Carmen kills all of
her toys, she must show them to me one by one, hopping on my shoulder
where she can drop a paper clip down my shirt or leave a sticky note in
my hair.
After an hour or so comes my own favorite Carmen-time. Finding
nothing more to play with, having spent long enough reading books over
my shoulder and turning pages that I did not want turned, and having
finished all of her e-mail correspondence, Carmen settles onto my
shoulder, into the crook of my arm, or on my lap against my belly; she
rounds her soft breast over her feet, fluffs and then unfluffs her feathers,
and becomes perfectly still. Sometimes she will close her eyes; other
times she will simply rest, entirely at peace. She might make a contented
little sound, one I never hear from her aviary. It is a sigh-chirp, reserved
for these moments of quiet snuggling. If I am still, I can feel her swift
heartbeat. I will never tire of such moments. Comfort, rest, and
unexpected consolation, shared so easily between two beings who grew
from such seemingly different limbs of the taxonomic tree.
I envision moments such as these shared between Wolfgang and Star. I
am certain that they were common. It is tempting to assume that in a
respectable eighteenth-century home, the bird would sit decoratively in
its rococo-style cage, interacting with the household humans only insofar
as it took its flageolet lessons from the perch within. But pet birds of the
time were allowed out of their cages and made part of daily life, much
more so than most modern pet birds. While the typical pet-store birds
today are not raised by hand, birds from eighteenth-century European
bird sellers were generally stolen from their nests as young (alas, like
Carmen) and raised in a home. They were accustomed to human
presence, very tame, knew how to fly around a room without bashing
into things, and on the whole made good family pets. Then, as now, the
level of actual social interaction varied with the species of bird. Finches
and canaries are tamable, diverting, and sing prettily but will always be a
bit skittish. Species with higher plasticity of behavior—birds like parrots,
starlings, and mynahs (the mimics, notably)—are capable of much more.
As far as we know, Star was the first bird Mozart brought into his
married household, but he’d lived with many animals throughout his life.
A field guide to Mozart family animals would include his childhood dog,
Bimperl, several canaries, and the old horse he brought from Salzburg to
Vienna whom he lovingly called the Kleper, or “nag.” The Mozarts
responded to their pets with a lively affection. When traveling in Europe,
young Mozart would send newsy letters home that culminated with
messages for the spaniel: “Cover Bimperl in a thousand million kisses,
and pull her fluffy tail for me one hundred times, and fluff her fur until
she barks!”
Star and Gauckerl, like other pets of the era, were at the center of a
sea change regarding human attitudes toward nonhuman creatures. It
remained a predominant belief throughout the eighteenth century that all
organisms were created by God for human pleasure or edification. Birds
sing for our delight. Cows dot the landscape to inspire feelings of
serenity and, of course, to feed us. Even seemingly insidious creatures
demonstrate Divine Wisdom and the love of God for Man: weeds exist to
encourage human industry and the movement of our bodies for health;
lice incite us to keep clean.
Before the eighteenth century, human relationships with animals were
largely utilitarian—food, transport, work, and scientific research. While
the aristocracy might have kept exotic pets, the bourgeoisie in general
did not. With René Descartes at the helm of a fashionable rationalist
philosophy, only humans were imbued with consciousness; animals were
mindless “automatons,” incapable of either thought or suffering. Their
cries during scientific study or slaughter were likened by Descartes to the
squeaking of a door on its hinges—nothing more. The philosophy of
Descartes had become ingrained in the emerging sciences, particularly
medicine, where it was used to justify horrific surgical research on live
animals.
It was partly in response to Descartes that Rousseau published his
Social Contract in 1762, just twelve years before Mozart brought Star
home. Rousseau was born a Calvinist and earnestly converted to
Catholicism as a young man, yet he came to believe that the highest
insight into religious truth was not revealed but “natural”—found in the
pageantry and harmony of nature. Animals became not just workers in
the field of God, but windows into the character and workings of God.
Rousseau wandered the countryside for peace of mind and heart, and
there, amid the simple quietness of plants and the movements of birds, he
experienced a “unity of all things” that anticipated the modern ecology
movement. His work on animals is an outright rejection of Descartes.
Animals may or may not be rational, but they are clearly sentient; they
can suffer and so deserve to be treated kindly by humans. Rousseau laid
the philosophical groundwork for a continuum between human and
animal consciousness in the Social Contract, writing: “Every animal has
ideas, since it has senses; it even combines those ideas in a certain
degree; and it is only in degree that man differs, in this respect, from the
brute.”
It was the Rousseauian view of nature that largely inspired the culture
of human-animal interaction in Mozart’s time, when it became
increasingly popular to keep pets in upper- and middle-class homes—
dogs and birds in particular. (As mousers, cats were considered working
animals and were most often kept by the lower and farming classes.) Pets
were, more than ever before, brought into the house and the round of
daily life, and it is this—direct daily contact with animals by ordinary
people—that undermined Descartes more than any academic or lofty
moral argument. People living with pets could see very clearly that these
animals possessed consciousness worthy of human consideration. The
pet-keeping of this period is often interpreted as being merely decorative,
but Mozart and his starling were actually part of a great philosophical
bridge leading from a disastrous lack of ethical standing for animals to
the strong evolutionary case for animal consciousness in the nineteenth-
century work of Charles Darwin and George Romanes, who in scientific
language posited a continuity between humans and animals, both in body
and in mind. Their work, along with Rousseau’s Social Contract, led to a
movement for the humane treatment of animals and eventually the
original Humane Society.
Still, it would be a mistake to confuse this commonsense recognition
of animal consciousness with a modern ecological view of wild animals
in nature. Rousseau was an Enlightenment thinker but romantic to the
core; for the public, the Rousseauian vision of nature’s goodness, order,
and harmony trickled down into an idealized, tamed, garden-like
sensibility. Their pet-keeping reflected this.
Like the effort to make native birdsongs conform to a more human
sense of proper musical structure, elaborate cages were patterned after
the current taste in architecture. The finer cages were often crafted of
mahogany, with silver or brass fittings and lots of tiny alcoves and turrets
too small for a bird to enter. They were difficult to clean, decorated with
toxic paint, and riddled with exposed nails—created more for ornament
than for the health of birds. Tiny, portable cages that allowed singing
birds to be carried from room to room were popular, an idyllic
eighteenth-century version of the boom box. (I doubt the Mozarts had
one of these, as there was plenty of music in the house already.)

Much of what we know about eighteenth-century bird-keeping centers

on a study of portraiture. Professionally commissioned portraits from this
period regularly show women and children with pet birds out of their
cages. Birds are perched on the shoulders of their keepers, sitting on their
fingers, playing with the ribbons on their costumes, eating bits of food
from their hands or from the end of a proffered stick (like the Starbucks
stirring sticks I used to raise Carmen). All these behaviors imply hours of
daily freedom; birds that are primarily caged do not remain tame or
tractable enough to interact with their keepers so gently and intimately.
Any bird, even when it is raised by hand, will become wary of people
when left alone in a cage. In Meredith West’s modern study, the hand-
raised birds that were kept on the porch rather than in the house lost their
tameness among humans. But in these portraits, we see a teenage girl and
a colorful finch perched on the same chair, looking at each other with
ease and familiarity; a child and dove each holding one end of a red silk
streamer; a woman in a parlor playing her tabletop piano for a chaffinch
who stands gazing up from the toe of her silk slipper. (The woman
herself looks aloof, bored, desperate for any kind of diversion, as so
many intelligent upper-class women were.)
 Elegant Lady with Miniature. An uncaged canary watches as the young lady
dubiously assesses her lover’s letter and miniature portrait. (Michel Garnier,
ca. 1790)

For such paintings, all humans appear in their finery—little boys are
scrubbed to shining, girls are skirted by froths of billowing pale silk.
Men do not typically appear in portraits with birds unless it is a family
portrait and the bird is among the children. Societally and artistically, the
bird represents a sense of innocent pleasure; hence, it belongs in the
realm of children and young women. The portraits convey the
atmosphere of a pre-fall Eden, a proper garden of wonders for the young.
Mozart, of course, was a man. But just because men are not seen
engaging with birds in portraits does not mean that they did not do so in
the privacy of their households. And Mozart, we know, was a bird of a
different feather.
There is a reason that I have not been able to find a portrait that
includes a starling from this period. Pet birds and family portraits were
both symbols of social rank. Exotic parrots and finely trained canaries
were expensive and indicative of a certain status. Starlings were
common, native birds that any peasant could pluck from a nest. In a shop
they cost just a few kreuzer and so were unfit for portraiture. It says a
great deal that the status-conscious Mozart chose a starling for his pet—
it means that he didn’t want just a bird, he wanted this bird.

Where does all of this put Star in the Mozarthaus? For Mozart, there
could be only one answer: Where the music was. Where Star could be
watched, twitted to, flirted with. Where he could join the music, pester
the maestro, pluck at the violin strings, pull at the quill pen, tip the ink
bottle. The Mozarts, always, made their own music, their own bohemian
life. The elegy that Mozart composed for Star when he died shows such a
keen understanding of the starling personality, such a personal knowing
of his bird, that the two must have shared each other’s company day to
day. “He was not naughty, quite / But gay and bright.” The little yellow
statue of Star in the Mozarthaus should go in the study.
Did Star venture beyond the study? It is unlikely. Surely the servants
had no time for such nonsense. In the parlor, Star might poop on the fine
felt surface of the gaming table or upset the whist game by stealing a
card. Guests in the parlor would not have appreciated starling poo in
their freshly friseured tresses any more than my modern guests do in
their hair. (If Carmen is out of her aviary when friends are around, we
offer “poop shirts”—some old things of ours that Carmen can poop on—
so no one’s outfit gets mussed.) Besides, starlings get attached to a
familiar place. Like Carmen with her aviary and its environs, Star was
probably happy staying close to Mozart’s cheerful study.

I can hardly breathe when I ponder Mozart’s daily schedule and

workload. His output was almost inconceivable. In 1784, the year he and
Constanze moved to Camesina House, he wrote six piano concertos, one
piano quintet, one string quartet, two piano sonatas, two sets of
variations for piano, and dozens of shorter compositions. In 1785 he
composed three piano concertos, two string quartets, one piano quartet, a
sonata and the Fantasia in C Minor for piano, the Maurerische
Trauermusik (Masonic Funeral Music), operatic scenes for vocal trio and
quartet, and several gorgeous parlor songs, and arranged the Mass in C
Minor as part of a cantata.
We imagine him, like most writers, painters, and other artists,
working in undisturbed peace and seclusion, with his dutiful spouse
shushing the babes and guarding her genius husband’s privacy. In the
Mozart household, nothing could have been further from the truth.
Constanze was a beloved partner to Wolfgang, but as Volkmar
Braunbehrens writes in his brilliant biography Mozart in Vienna: 1781–
1791, she was not “a good little housewife who spent the whole day
doing laundry, cooking, and keeping the children away from her husband
so he could have the peace to work. The Mozart house was a loud and
restless one, but least of all because of the children, who played a minor
role; it had more to do with music—pupils, house concerts, and
rehearsals—and with Mozart’s own need for constant commotion:
conversation, laughter, visitors who were often houseguests.”
We know that Mozart’s house was full of music. He was running
about Vienna, yes, but he was also at home for hours each day,
composing, playing, teaching. It is said that when thinking he spoke
aloud to himself in operatic recitative. Constanze had a splendid voice
and sang as she knit lace, sewed, or chased and dandled the children. In
the summer of 1788, Constanze’s brother-in-law Joseph Lange (who had
married Aloysia, Constanze’s older sister and the object of Mozart’s
early romantic passion) brought a gaggle of theater folk, including two
Danish actors, to visit the Mozarts. We have this wonderful diary entry
from one of the Danes, a slice of Mozart home life:

There I had the happiest hour of music that has ever fallen to my
lot. This small man and great master twice extemporized on a
pedal pianoforte, so wonderfully! so wonderfully! that I quite lost
myself. He intertwined the most difficult passages with the most
lovely themes. —His wife cut quill-pens for the copyist, a pupil
composed, a little boy aged four walked about in the garden and
sang recitatives—in short, everything that surrounded this
splendid man was musical!

The diarist was an enamored guest, and Wolfgang surely took a

moment to show off, but nearly all reports of daily life at the Mozart
compound are similar: musical and domestic chaos, and the composer
happy within it. There were the children, upon whom Wolfgang doted,
and the dog, and the students. Mozart taught female students in their own
homes, where they were chaperoned, as was customary, but male
students came to his studio, and particularly gifted young men would
stay on for months, perhaps a year, and live as part of the household,
treated as family. Mozart not only managed to compose amid all this
chaos; by all reports, he preferred it. The background noise and bustle
was something to work against. It is said that when Wolfgang was
composing music in his mind, his outward actions changed little, but
something about his countenance became for a moment a touch distant,
as if he were listening to a faraway birdsong, before his quill sped along
again. Star would not have been a distraction at all—at least, not an
unwelcome one, but rather a strand in the splendid, essential, almost
divine chaos.
Leopold made just one extraordinary visit to Wolfgang and Constanze
after they were married. He arrived in March of 1785 for a ten-week
stay, prepared to be appalled at the state of the household and marriage.
Instead, he was impressed with Constanze’s economy and enthralled
with the liveliness of the home. He wrote to Nannerl, whom he had left
alone in Salzburg: “It is impossible to describe the rush and bustle. Since
my arrival your brother’s piano has been taken at least a dozen times to
the theater or to some other house.” This happened constantly—the fussy
maestro preferred his own instrument for performances, and so it was
moved every two or three days.
Earlier that year, Mozart had composed a set of quartets for his friend
and mentor Joseph Haydn and was anxious for the maestro’s opinion
before he ventured to formally dedicate them. During Leopold Mozart’s
stay in the Domgasse apartment, the quartets were performed at a small
party for Haydn, with Wolfgang playing viola, and Leopold Mozart
himself playing first violin. After, Haydn famously commented to
Leopold: “I swear to you before God and as an honest man that your son
is the greatest composer I have ever known in person or by name” (and
in a jarring departure from the rest of the Mozarthaus museum’s
simplicity, these words are painted in slender period calligraphic style on
the salon wall). In my imagination, Leopold’s narrow face is almost
permanently lined with an anxious semi-scowl, his dark version of the
Mona Lisa’s smile. Still, the pleasure he felt at this compliment could not
have been hidden.
The night was a glorious one for Mozart. Haydn loved the quartets,
his father was proud, the parlor was filled with glowing candles and the
swooshing whisper of brocade. During my visit I walked to the windows
of this open sunny room, which overlooked a narrow, cobbled pedestrian
alley, sweet buildings, and my favorite little café away from the busy-
ness of the Graben, surrounded by pink autumn petunias. I closed my
eyes and heard the music.
If my suspicions are correct, there was another layer to the musical
offerings that night, beyond the usual quartet instrumentation. Mozart’s
study and, if I am right, Star’s cage were just one room away. An
acclaimed neuropsychologist wrote that “only humans have a natural, or
innate, inclination to engage with music.” I read this aloud one evening
at the dinner table and everyone cracked up. Clearly this scientist has
never lived with a starling. When live music is played in our house,
Carmen is constitutionally incapable of silence. She jumps and flutters
and then settles into singing with full starling exuberance. Whistled
cadenzas, warbles, Hi, Carmen! Hi, honey! Wine-stopper sounds, more
whistles. Wildness, joyfulness.
There is plenty of opportunity. Claire is a gifted musician, playing for
hours a day on her cello but also on piano, mandolin, and guitar. I play
the Celtic harp and a little violin and piano. Tom—well, Tom plays the
cowbell. Usually, we just revel in Carmen’s participation, hearing it as an
element of the music—par for the course in our slightly eccentric
household of writers and players. But it can be a nuisance when Claire is
trying to make a cello recording for an audition or give a serious home
performance. Sometimes I’ll take Carmen up to my study when Claire
needs to make a clean recording, but once we attached a note to a
recorded audition for a prestigious festival. Claire had played perfectly
and nearly cried when she heard the overlay of Hi, Carmen! Kiss me! on
top of her Tchaikovsky. Please excuse the bird sounds. We have a pet
starling. Mozart had one too.
It’s not just Carmen. This is what starlings do—they join the music.
What happened the night that Haydn’s quartets were performed? Did the
Mozarts toss a blanket over Star’s cage to discourage the loud whistles
and warbles that the music surely incited? Did they close the door to
dampen Star’s song? Certainly not. Leopold loved birds at least as much
as his son did. I would bet a hundred gulden that they all laughed,
opened wide the doors between the rooms, and enjoyed another strain of
the household orchestra.
 Six

HOW THE STARLING KNEW

Though I did not attempt to teach Carmen particular words or phrases

while raising her, I did try to teach her the motif from Mozart’s Piano
Concerto No. 17 in G, the musical phrase that, we know from Mozart’s
notebook, Star could sing. I wondered if it might be a tune that starlings
in general responded to, and in any case, it would be a wonderful
element of the narrative to say that Carmen learned Star’s tune. I
imagined the YouTube video that we would produce: Carmen singing
alongside images of the maestro, murmurations of starlings flying in the
background, and eventually a full orchestra picking up the theme. So
even when Carmen was a baby bird tucked into her cottage-cheese tub-
nest on my desk, I played the motif from Mozart’s concerto for her on
my violin at least thirty times a day; I hummed the tune while tidying my
study; I looped an orchestral recording on my iPod and let it run while I
was at the grocery store. Carmen was raised on a steady diet of
homemade starling mash and Mozart.
As it turned out, Carmen had no intention of learning the motif. But
by the time she was two months old, she did take a keen interest in
learning the violin. She is the only creature on earth who has ever
seemed to take pleasure in my playing. (Once I was practicing with the
window open, and three neighborhood dogs began to howl.) Her favorite
place to study violin was from her perch at the tip of my bow. At two
months, a full-size bird, she weighed just two ounces. Still, it is difficult
to play with a starling on your bow. Now, as an adult, Carmen prefers to
perch on the scroll of the violin and gape between the strings; she places
her bill between two strings, opens her mandibles wide, and then pulls
her bill out, so both strings ring. This seems to delight her. But she will
not learn the Mozart motif. Starlings are among the few songbirds who
continue to learn new vocalizations year after year, so I am not without
hope that she will surprise me one day. It is a sweet phrase, and Star
could not have chosen a lovelier tune to share with his new owner.
I attended the Seattle Symphony’s performance of the Concerto in G
recently, with internationally acclaimed virtuoso Imogen Cooper at the
piano and conducting the orchestra as she played. She walked through
the big doors of the performance hall and onto the stage like an oak
draped in red sateen—statuesque, strong, rooted. As this concerto begins,
we in the audience scarcely have time to adjust to our surroundings
before Mozart tosses us headlong with his music into the full current of
human emotional possibility, yet he manages the swift transitions with
such beauty that we do not think to resist. Mozart believed, always, in
beauty and in harmony and would not sacrifice either, no matter how
dark his themes. He wrote this out in a famous 1781 letter to Leopold
that is now taken as an articulation of his musical philosophy and a
foundational statement of Viennese classicism: “Passions, violent or not,
must never be expressed to the point of disgust, and Music must never
offend the ear, even in the most horrendous situations, but must always
be pleasing, in other words, always remain Music.”
The concerto has three movements, the allegro, the andante, and the
allegretto. In the first, the allegro, Mozart progresses from one musical
idea to the next without restraint and with practiced effortlessness. The
effect is a nuanced joy that ventures into unexpected keys with such
fluency that we almost forget to be unsettled. The woodwinds carry
much of the discourse here; we modern audiences might not even notice
it, but in Mozart’s time a strong woodwind voice was unusual. After all
the sweet activity of the allegro, the dark serenity of the andante falls
over the audience like a shroud. The opening is an ethereal string theme,
which after about twenty seconds abruptly stops. Just stops. The oboe
and bassoon take up the silence and sing behind a floating solo flute.
Finally, the piano enters, entirely alone. The dramatic pauses continue,
reminding us constantly that we are in the hands of a master operatic
composer—operatic drama will emerge increasingly from here on in
Mozart’s concertos and symphonies. Now it is the piano that sings this
concerto’s wordless aria. There are harmonic surprises and further forays
into unusual keys. I cannot close my eyes, because I don’t want to miss
the oak-trunk movements of Imogen Cooper at her instrument,
conducting with limited, but dramatic, movements of her body, arm-
branches, and eyebrows. But even with my eyes open, I feel I am
surrounded by forest imagery—earth, mist, a veiled, enchanted-but-dark
place. And the flute, to me, is Pan’s.
There is no rest. The allegretto leaps immediately into the relief of G
major and the first notes of the starling’s motif. The shadows disperse.
Instead of the expected rondo, Mozart dispatches five variations on the
theme and then, in the finale, runs away with it in a prodigal fantasia in
which Star’s motif surfaces over and over against the riverine flow of the
piano cadenzas.
They say that birds prefer Mozart above other composers, and
perhaps this is true. But not Carmen. She prefers Bach and bluegrass.
Based on the exuberance of her reactions, she even has a favorite band—
Greensky Bluegrass. When this beautiful concerto of Mozart’s is
playing, she will sit impassively on my shoulder, almost yawning. But
when the final movement begins, she is excited. She jumps down to my
hand where she can look me in the eye. Hi, Carmen! Hi, honey! she calls
before breaking into her own shrill starling aria. There is something here
for her. There is something here for everyone. In the program notes to
the Seattle performance, the commentator suggests that the andante
movement’s “nod toward melancholy is swept away by the next
animated variation.” But in my hearing, this is not true. The melancholia
remains, perhaps more romantic than existential, but lingering within our
listening experience. The exuberance of the finale contains the darkness,
enfolds it, shelters it, redeems it. But does not forget it.
Like most of Mozart’s music, this concerto is written on two levels—
one for the simple enjoyment of the musically uneducated ear, and one
for the musical adept. Mozart could not have maintained his public
popularity and sustained his own genius-level interest in any other way.
In a famous anecdote, Emperor Joseph was present for the first
performance of the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio and remarked
afterward to the composer, “Too beautiful for our ears and an
extraordinary number of notes, dear Mozart,” who was said to have
replied, “Just as many, Your Majesty, as necessary.” The exchange as
imagined by Peter Shaffer for the play and movie Amadeus is more
caustic and has become something of an anthem to the creative spirit:

JOSEPH: There you are. It’s clear. It’s German. It’s quality work.
There are simply too many notes. Do you see?
MOZART: There are just as many notes, Majesty, neither more nor
less, as are required.

I agree with many scholars’ skepticism over the authenticity of the

exchange, but it does capture an honest conflict for Mozart, a young
composer whose head was nearly exploding with new musical ideas, a
man who required imperial support but whose audiences, both public and
sovereign, were not quite ready for the full force of his originality.
Biographer Maynard Solomon notes that while the story may not be
reliable in its fine points, it is nevertheless true that in the next round of
imperial sponsorship for German-language opera, Mozart was not
employed to write anything except a minor comedic singspiel.

By now, the fact of the starling’s ability to mimic a simple musical

phrase should be no surprise. But rumors over how the bird learned
Mozart’s refrain have run wild. In short commentaries and recording
liners and program notes for this concerto, I have read emphatic but
unsupported statements that the starling taught the motif to Mozart. That
Mozart taught it to the starling. That Mozart heard the starling whistle a
folk song that sounded like his motif. And, most astonishing, that
“Mozart trained a pet Starling to whistle, in its entirety, all of one
movement of his G major piano concerto, though the bird consistently
sang two notes a bit flat.” Not only is the “all of one movement” claim a
shocking hyperbole—even for a starling—but we know from the
notations in Mozart’s book that Star sang one note sharp, not two notes
flat. What respectable starling would be caught dead singing flat?
The whimsical suggestion that Star taught the motif to Mozart—that
he sang a song of his own adapted by Mozart for the concerto—appears
in print with some frequency. Such claims are proffered by folk who are
speculating with just a tidbit of information. Though Mozart will, as
we’ll see, incorporate starling-esque cadences and personality traits
inspired by Star into later work, this concerto was completed more than a
month before Mozart brought his bird home, and so for this composition
such a proposal remains nearly impossible. There is, however, a sweet
children’s book that fictionalizes the theory delightfully. In Mozart Finds
a Melody, by Stephen Costanza, Mozart is facing a deadline and is
plagued by a bad case of writer’s block:

For the first time in Wolfgang’s life, the famous composer was at a
loss for a tune. He tried every trick to get his imagination going.
He sang standing on his head. He played his violin in the bathtub.
He even threw darts at the blank music paper. Alas, nothing
worked.

The bird sings notes that start to coalesce into a theme that Mozart
can use, but just as Mozart is ready to put quill to paper, the bird flies out
the window. The distraught composer must find the bird in order to
finish his tune. The role of starling as muse is authentic, but the idea that
the bird taught this tune to Mozart is far-fetched.
But what is true? How and when did Star learn Mozart’s motif? There
are really only two overarching possibilities: either Star learned the motif
before Wolfgang purchased him at the shop, as in my introductory tale,
or he learned the song after the purchase, while living with the Mozart
family. There are problems with both. If Star could sing the motif before
(or at the time) that Mozart bought him, then how had he learned it? If
Star learned the motif later, then how could Mozart have recorded the
tune in his notebook at the time he bought the bird?
The answer to this question was a kind of holy grail to me while I
traveled in Vienna and Salzburg. I believed that by the time I finished my
researches there, examined documents, wandered Mozart’s homes, talked
with experts, and let daydreams trail through my brain under the
influence of the Austrian landscape, I would, somehow, have uncovered
the solution to this lovely musico-ornithological mystery. It didn’t
matter, I knew, in the scheme of things. Why, really, when I know the
essentials of the story, should I care about the arcana?
I can answer only in the way thousands of seekers over hundreds of
years have answered their own version of such a question: I care with the
brightened curiosity of one who loves a subject for no rational reason,
but who loves it nonetheless, and prodigally. This is the ardor of the
academic Austenologist who believes that if she looks beneath the
floorboards of the right dusty attic, she will find the diary entry
explaining why Jane Austen rejected her one marriage proposal the day
after she’d accepted it; of the birder in Costa Rica tiptoeing through trails
of biting ants and fer-de-lance serpents in hopes of glimpsing a rare
hummingbird that no one has seen for fifteen years. I could list such
loves forever, the sort that visit our imaginations on the cusp of the
impossible but that we cannot erase from our minds. We follow the trail
with whatever bread crumbs we can gather, with hope, with love, with an
almost magical combination of urgency and patience. There were just
enough crumbs in the Mozart story that I felt confident that, with enough
sleuthing, the details of just how the Mozart-and-Star story unfolded
would fill my grail chalice. Naturally, that is not at all what happened.
As far as objective facts go, in all of my Austrian snooping, I
uncovered little more than the broad strokes I already knew. Mozart’s
own catalog of work tells us that the concerto was completed on April
12, 1784. It has long been believed by musical historians that the piece
was meant to be a strict secret, not performed publicly until mid-June of
that year, when Mozart conducted it with a small chamber ensemble that
included Barbara Ployer—his gifted young student for whom the
concerto was composed—at the piano. This recital took place before a
small, elite audience at the von Ployers’ country residence, where the
great doors might have been opened to the garden of chestnut trees,
allowing the cool evening breezes to lull the attendees into an even
deeper romantic state than the music would normally induce.
We know from Mozart’s expense notebook that Star was purchased
on May 27 and that he could sing the line from the Piano Concerto in G.
It was Mozart’s habit for a time to record all his expenditures in this
small booklet. The purchase just prior to the starling reads, Two lilies of
the valley, 1 kreuzer, making Mozart, with his acquisitions of flowers and
birds, appear to be even more romantic than he actually was. Previous
and future purchases are more prosaic and include staff paper, ink,
books. The notebook was used as a primary reference in an early 1798
biography of Mozart by Franz Niemetschek, for which Constanze
provided source material. More thorough references to the notebook,
with facsimiles of some pages, including the ones with the starling
references, appear in a thematic catalog of Mozart’s ephemera gathered
in 1828. In the commentary for this facsimile, it is mentioned that the
musical notation recording the starling’s song was written zugleich
folgende, or “immediately following,” the record of the bird’s purchase,
implying that he recorded the starling singing at the same time that he
bought it.
If not for the notebook, it would be easiest to argue that Star learned
the motif once he was home with the Mozarts. This is the way of
starlings. They involve themselves in the daily sounds of their flock—
whether that flock is made up of birds, humans, or violins. Like any
other starling worth its feathers, Star would simply have absorbed and
mimicked favored sounds from his setting—and what a setting he had!
In this scenario, Star simply picked up the tune as it was practiced or
whistled by Wolfgang in his study. And what bird (besides my contrary
Carmen) wouldn’t love to sing the merry rondo of Mozart’s seventeenth
concerto? It is a sweet, self-contained, chirpy little refrain—perfect for a
starling.
Even so, Meredith West argues in her seminal 1990 paper that Star
could already sing the motif when Mozart bought him in the shop. She
relies heavily on the evidence provided in what we know of Mozart’s
little expense book combined with her research on the nature of starlings:

Given our observation that whistled tunes are altered and

incorporated into mixed themes, we assume that the melody was
new to the bird because it was so close a copy of the original.
Thus, we entertain the possibility that Mozart, like other animal
lovers, had already visited the shop and interacted with the
starling before 27 May. Mozart was known to hum and whistle a
good deal. Why should he refrain in the presence of a bird that
seems to elicit such behavior so easily?

When I spoke to Dr. West recently, nearly thirty years after the
publication of her paper, she told me that she still feels this is the most
likely way for events to have unfolded. It is entirely plausible; Mozart
was drawn into a shop full of singing birds. How could he not be?
Wolfgang had kept birds during his childhood and loved them. The
exuberance of the starling’s song he now heard—so different from the
canaries he had grown up with—piqued his native curiosity. In her paper,
West supports her theory that Mozart was attracted to this particular bird
for more than its song, noting that, like a starling, Mozart himself was
attuned to nonverbal communication and to visual cues. She invokes the
feeling that overwhelmed Mozart at a performance of The Magic Flute,
where he found the “silent approval,” as he wrote to Constanze—his
feeling that the audience members were attuned, involved, in love with
his music—even more gratifying than their enthusiastic applause. Mozart
observed in his audience the same attitude assumed by a starling when
something captures its interest. When you talk to a tame starling, it
jumps as close to you as it can get, tilts its head, and listens. So
gratifying! Mozart was well aware of his own gifts, yet craved attention
and approval for his music. When visited by Mozart in the shop, Star
gave the composer these very things. As West writes:

To be whistled to by Mozart! Surely the bird would have adopted

its listening posture, thereby rewarding the potential buyer with
“silent applause.”

While the canaries and finches were flying around their little shop
cages, thrashing and singing within their own little worlds, here was an
iridescent bird looking right at Mozart and seeming to wonder, What will
this man say next? What will he sing? What will he whistle? Wolfgang
could not resist such an agreeable audience. He whistled his dear little
phrase. Whistled it again—four times, five. Carmen takes much longer
than this to learn a new word, but a particularly gifted and willing
starling mimic could begin to pick up the phrase that fast. Perhaps
Mozart visited a couple more times, unable to resist the call of this
flirtatious new friend. And when Star had learned a passable version of
the motif? Well, how could Wolfgang not take such a friend home?
My own imagined tale, recounted at the beginning of this book, is a
variation on West’s theme. Here Star has learned the motif before
purchase, but Mozart did not teach the bird his tune. Instead, he was
drawn into the shop by the sound of the bird singing it, as if following
the fragrance of a freshly baked Viennese plum cake. This, too, is
possible. The bird catcher’s stall was almost certainly on the Graben, a
vital commercial district bustling with shoppers and musicians day and
night. Mozart composed the concerto when living at 29 Graben, the
apartment’s windows just above the string of markets and sellers of all
kinds. He was still copying the music over in May, when the windows
would have been open to the spring air after a dust-settling rain and the
musical strains might have filtered out into the world and perhaps into a
starling’s little ear. There is no reason that Star could not have picked up
a bit of the motif and played it over on his starling tongue until it came
out nearly in the form that Mozart had composed. And once it did, there
would have been no stopping the repetition—starlings love to share
freshly learned mimicked sounds.
But scholarship that has surfaced since the publication of West’s
paper suggests another, more plausible way by which Star could have
gleaned the tune before Mozart met him. We now suspect that the
concerto might have had a somewhat earlier public debut at a prestigious
concert with Emperor Joseph II in attendance at the beautiful Kärntnertor
Theater (now the footprint of the famous Hotel Sacher) on April 29. This
would be in line with Mozart’s typical eagerness to place a piece before
the public eye, even if the ink on the pages wasn’t quite dry. It would not
even have been the newest work by Mozart performed that night, for the
evening’s program was ordered in part to feature the virtuoso violinist
Regina Strinasacchi. Wolfgang wrote to his father on April 24, a
Saturday: “We have the famous Strinasacchi from Mantua here right
now; she is a very good violinist, has excellent taste and a lot of feeling
in her playing.” Mozart loved to compose specifically for particular
virtuosos or voices—some of his pieces were so difficult that they could
be performed by only one exceptional artist. He continued astonishingly:
“I’m composing a Sonata for her at this moment that we’ll be performing
together Thursday in her concert at the Theater.” It takes a lot of temerity
to compose a piece just days before it will be performed before the
emperor. It has become a famous (and true) Mozart anecdote that he
played the piano part this night from an unfinished penciled score,
improvising the cadenzas and conducting at the same time.
It is now cautiously believed by many scholars that the Piano
Concerto in G debuted publicly this night as well, also with Mozart at the
piano. It would certainly have given the tune a chance to get out on the
street before Mozart met and bought Star. The theater was just a ten-
minute or so walk from the district where the bird catcher’s shop likely
stood, down a cobbled street past the Hofburg Palace at the end of the
Graben (near the current opera house).
And the vector from performance hall to starling? The famous
whistlers of Vienna, of course—the everyday street-walking people who
soaked in the surrounding music and then whistled it back out again.
Humming and whistling filled the streets of eighteenth-century Vienna.
There were no radios, no iPods. There were only these public
performances and the repetition of a strong theme, as in this concerto
where the catchy motif that occurs repeatedly within the allegretto and is
reprised in the finale was an intentional gift from the composer to the
audience; it gave people something memorable to take home.
It is said that from childhood, Mozart could memorize whole
symphonies after one hearing well enough to write them down note-
perfect. (In 1770, Leopold was traveling with his fourteen-year-old son
and wrote home to Anna Maria after attending a performance at the
Sistine Chapel, “You have often heard of the great Miserere, in Rome. It
is so greatly prized that the performers in the Sistine chapel are forbidden
on pain of excommunication to copy it.” Leopold was not exaggerating.
He went on. “But we have it already. Wolfgang has written it down.”)
Most people, of course, did not have this skill. Composers—and Mozart
was a master at this—would create a refrain not just for the art of their
music, but for the heart and ear of their public, who would have an easy-
to-remember phrase to carry with them and hum in days to come. Star
could well have heard Mozart’s tune whistled from the street by a
concertgoer. Even more likely, since starlings learn best from personal
interaction, someone who had attended the concerto performance might
have stopped into the shop and whistled the phrase to the bird, who then
learned it quickly.
All of these possible pathways to Star learning the motif involve
educated imagination but no exaggeration of known facts, Mozart’s
biography, the musical timeline, or starling capabilities. All are within
the realm of the intelligently possible. Yet there is a gray area here. What
if Star learned the motif after Mozart brought him home, and Mozart
simply added the musical notation to his notebook later? That would
explain everything.
But here’s the catch: If the bird learned the song after he came to live
in the Mozart home, Wolfgang would have had to record the purchase of
the bird, then go back to his notebook and record the mimicked motif
later, once Star had started to sing it. This doesn’t seem like such a hard
thing, except for the fact that Mozart was a dismal record keeper. He did
maintain a good catalog of his finished music, but other than that he
didn’t keep track of much at all. He had no diary, just the listing of
purchases in this little book, and within a year even this effort would
lapse—the last pages of the expense notebook were given over to
practicing written English.
Like many on Mozart’s trail, I long to get my hands on that booklet.
Was there a change in ink used? Odd spacing? Anything that might
indicate that the musical notation was made at a different time from the
purchase notation? Sadly, we do not have the actual expense book to
search for further clues—its whereabouts, if it still exists, are unknown.
It may be hiding in the labyrinthine bowels of some German university
or falling to dust in the basement of one of Constanze’s distant
descendants. For practical and scholarly purposes, the notebook is
simply gone.
But recall that in the facsimile pages copied directly from the
notebook, the commentator clearly stated that the musical entry appeared
zugleich folgende, or “immediately following,” the recording of the
expense for the bird, which would support the idea that the notation was
made at the time Star was purchased. Thus, what we can know of the
ephemera does seem to point to the mystery of a bird in a shop having
learned Mozart’s song before coming to live in the family home. In truth,
though, there is no way to know for certain, and I have come to accept
that those who claim otherwise are overreaching.
When I first drafted this chapter, I included my best guess as to when
and how Star learned Mozart’s tune. But I deleted it. I didn’t even put it
into my Cutting-Room Floor File for possible revisiting. I deleted it into
the ether, where it belongs. My grail chalice has been filled with an elixir
that is perhaps headier than the wine of fact—it is filled with swirling,
essential uncertainty and the difficult, mature task of dwelling in such a
state.
And yet, I believe inquiry into what we do know to be true matters
tremendously. History like this that has a basis in fact yet lies outside of
memory is necessarily subject to imagination. To make it
comprehensible, to make it real to our artful human minds, we tell it as a
story. But when we force our will, rather than our intelligence and
honesty, on a historical story, it loses its reality and is diminished. At its
heart, the story of Mozart and Star is beautiful, meaningful, and true. It is
belittled and made false by exaggeration and mere rumor—the starling
did not teach the motif to Mozart; the starling did not sing an entire
concerto. But we can perceive the sweet and authentic center. We know
that an unusual friendship between one of history’s most loved
composers and one of the world’s least loved birds began in May of
1784, when, in one order or another, Mozart wrote the starling’s song in
his book, conferred his judgment—Das war schön!—plunked down his
kreuzer, and took the bird home, smiling like a jackass eating thistles.
 Seven

CHOMSKY’S STARLING

C’mere, honey! Tom, Claire, and I were standing in the kitchen as

Carmen called from her aviary. We all stared at one another, silently. As
usual, Claire voiced the brave thought first: “She made a sentence.” No
one spoke after that except Carmen, who said, C’mere, honey!
In the past, Carmen had mimicked Hi, honey, and C’mere, but never
C’mere, honey! So, yes, it seemed that she had just combined words and
phrases, albeit simple ones, into a new pattern that made sense. Instead
of mimicking a sentence she’d heard, it appeared that she had done
something of a different order: she’d made a sentence of her own.
Finally, I ventured uncertainly, “That wasn’t a sentence,” at least not an
intentional one. Either she’d put the words together in a new way that
happened to make sense (she jumbled up her repertoire all the time), or
we had unwittingly been saying, “C’mere, honey,” to her, and she’d
latched onto it. Is it impossible that she meant to create a small sentence?
Probably, yes. But given what I’ve learned, both from Carmen and from
the current science on birds and language, I will never underestimate the
possibilities —for starlings, or for any of the beautiful, bewildering
voices in our more-than-human world.*
It is easy enough to find a starling voice to contemplate. At any time of
year, we can meander down the sidewalk and stand beneath a starling
settled on an electric wire—its favorite urban perch. It is tempting to
conclude that the long jumble of whistles, gurgles, and clicks we hear is
nothing more than a haphazard mess of sound. But it isn’t. With a bit of
attention, it is not difficult to tease out the sequence. Starlings will
sometimes sit there and rehearse seemingly random whistles and
imitations and various kinds of chatter. But in a full-fledged song bout,
where the bird throws its head skyward and lets loose for five seconds, or
twenty, or up to forty-five, the song is divided into easily recognizable
sections that follow a predictable pattern. The first is the whistle. This is
a series of long, wild, teakettle-ish sounds, ranging stormily up and down
the tonal spectrum. (It leads to some confusion among those who
encounter captive starlings like Carmen and are waiting for them to
mimic something; “She’s imitating the teakettle!” visitors delightedly
announce when they hear Carmen’s whistle—alas, she imitates a lot of
household sounds, but this one is just a good old wild-starling voice.)
After the whistle there is a quick pause, then the bird will break into its
own personal repertoire of sound phrases, some of them mimicked, some
of them learned from other starlings, some of them invented in its
singular starling brain, all of them gathered into a sequence that is
entirely unique to this individual bird. The literature claims that a single
bird will have somewhere between six and thirty individual sounds in its
repertoire, but based on Carmen’s performance, I suspect the number of
phrases for a gifted wild bird is beyond our current expectation. To me,
Carmen is a wondrous mimic, but in the starling world she is simply
average. She has fifteen phrases in her mimicked repertoire (that I
recognize—there are probably more), and she is learning more all the
time. Though females are fine mimics, a gifted male will mimic more
phrases—and of higher complexity—than the average female. I have a
hard time believing that among the millions of starlings in the world,
thirty is the upward limit for a precocious male singer.
After the initial whistle and repertoire sections of the song bout, there
is another swift pause. A male bird will now perform a series of clicks
and rattles. This is one vocalization that females do not usually employ,
and it’s a fair way to tell if you are listening to a male or female bird.*
The song will end with a whistled crescendo, different from the initial
section in that it is quicker, more direct, less varied, and usually louder.
That is the full starling song: whistle, repertoire, rattle, crescendo. It may
differ a bit here and there, but it is dependable on the whole. This is no
sweet-fluted wood thrush strain. This song is crazy-wild. It’s gorgeous,
in a loopy starling way. And it springs from a little bird with no idea that
it has, in the pattern of its song, dropped its shining little body and brain
into a turbulent academic debate—one that is both scientific and poetic.
Here biology, language, art, music, consciousness, and—yes—human
ego mingle, dance, and clash.

In the 1950s, a brilliant young linguist at MIT named Noam Chomsky

was doing some hard thinking about the nature and uniqueness of human
language. When Chomsky set to work on the topic, all of the social
sciences, including the academic discipline of linguistics, were
dominated by the tenets of behaviorism, which held that the only proper
arena of psychological study for both humans and animals was
observable, measurable, external behavior. Behaviorism had gained
ascendance within the sciences in the previous decade due to its ability to
quantify human and animal responses in experimental settings, making
so-called soft sciences, like psychology, hard, like mathematics and
chemistry. Work on something as murky and unknowable as
consciousness was relegated to a scientific backwater while the
behaviorist model garnered grants and publication in the best journals.
On the language front, behaviorism’s progenitor B. F. Skinner decreed
that children learned words and grammar by being positively reinforced
for correct usage. The payoff most often came in the form of a response
—eye contact, attention from an adult, or the chocolate cupcake the child
had requested using the proper words. Such rewards, for Skinner, were
akin to a lab rat getting its Purina Lab Chow pellet after pushing the right
button.*
Chomsky penned a scathing review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, and
like Kant responding to Hume, woke from his “dogmatic slumber” to
promulgate his own view. He pointed out that children create
grammatical sentences following patterns that they have never heard,
proving that instruction and reward are insufficient to explain the
complexity of human language learning. He came to believe that humans
are endowed with a faculty for language, a “language organ,” as he
misleadingly described it (since it cannot be said to be housed in a
discrete physical structure), that contained a universal and immutable set
of rules shared by all human languages, no matter how varied these
languages appeared on the surface. This is Chomsky’s Universal
Grammar, or UG. We generate meaning by using these linguistic rules to
combine words, build clauses, and incorporate these clauses into longer
sentences.
More than this, humans don’t make sentences solely by adding to
them bit by bit, as if a sentence were a rat growing a longer tail. Instead,
we often embed phrases within sentences, a process linguists call
recursion. Take the discrete phrase, also a short sentence, Mozart played
the violin. We could add to it in linear fashion: Mozart played the violin
and liked birds. Or we could employ the syntactical device of recursion
to embed the added information into the original sentence: Mozart, who
liked birds, played the violin. And we could go on: Mozart, who liked
birds, and in fact composed with a starling perched on his shoulder,
played the violin. Perhaps: Mozart, who liked birds, and in fact
composed with a starling, which had shockingly iridescent feathers,
perched on his shoulder, played the violin. We could do this forever,
limited only by breath and the capacity of memory. Many animals
communicate in the linear fashion, we know. Cetaceans, elephants,
winter wrens—all add complexity to their vocalizations by taking a
starting motif and adding to it, then adding some more. But using
recursion, humans are able to make meaning through sentences that are
more like blossoming peonies, growing from within. Chomsky came to
believe that the capacity for recursion is not only unique to humans but
the defining characteristic that sets human language apart from all other
forms of communication among living beings.
Aiming to bolster his theory, Chomsky coauthored a 2002 paper
published in Science with Harvard biologist and psychologist Marc
Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch, a linguist at the University of St. Andrews
in Scotland. In “The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and
How Did It Evolve?,” the three researchers sought to identify the
distinguishing features of human language and its development. They
scoured the literature to compare aspects of human and animal
communication, eliminating shared characteristics one by one. Memory,
for example, is critical to language, because, as Hauser put it in an
interview, “If you couldn’t keep in mind several pieces of a sentence,
you couldn’t understand anything. But memory’s not specific to [human]
language.” Some animals use memory in communication too. So
memory was off the Unique to Human Language list. The researchers
continued down their catalog of linguistic features until they were left
with just one property that could be said to define human language alone:
recursion.
To test their theory, Hauser and Fitch created a study to see whether a
nonhuman primate with complex vocal capacity could recognize
recursive patterns. They selected the cotton-top tamarin, a tiny, beautiful
New World monkey originating in Colombia. They chose the species for
its vocal complexity, but if you have seen a cotton-top tamarin, you
might wonder if it wasn’t chosen for its cuteness. They are among the
earth’s smallest primates, with dark faces surrounded by long manes of
white, feathery fur. Their gaze is intense, open, curious. Somehow, the
look on their faces seems to say, Sure, let’s study recursion! Have at it!
What do we do first?
Hauser and Fitch started by creating a simple artificial language. The
words were made up of short sounds pronounced by either men or
women, sounds like li and mo. The difference in pitch between the male
and female voices made it easy for anyone listening to tell the two
groups apart. Then the scientists combined the sounds into patterns—
short sentences, really—using two rules. The first rule was very simple:
a female sound would always be followed by a male sound. With A and
B representing the two sound groups, this simple rule would yield short
sentences such as ABAB. The second, more complex rule embedded a
female-male sound pair within one of the AB pairs, with a resulting
A(AB)B.
To create a baseline from which to judge the tamarins, the researchers
first tested humans, innocent young Harvard undergrads, in fact, to see
whether they could learn to recognize both patterns. After listening to
thirty sentences, the students were tested on new ones. More than 80
percent could correctly recognize the recursive sentence patterns. Then
Hauser tested the monkeys in his lab. The tamarins listened to recordings
of the patterns over and over in the evening, and in the morning, the
recordings were played for the monkeys again, along with the recordings
that violated the patterns. When the monkeys recognized a novelty, they
would turn toward the speaker and listen intently. According to Hauser,
the monkeys noticed when the ABAB pattern was violated but were not
able to pick out violations to the A(AB)B pattern. Chomsky was not the
least bit surprised.
In a disconcerting footnote, several years after the publication of the
tamarin study, Hauser’s professional colleagues began to question his
conclusions—and his research ethics. Hauser was a well-known tenured
professor at Harvard in 2007 when the school began an internal
investigation around possible scientific misconduct. By 2010, the
allegations came to public light, and scandal erupted around him. While
Hauser had honestly reported that the tamarins could not recognize
recursive patterns, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s
Office of Research Integrity found him guilty of several counts of
research fraud pertaining to other aspects of the tamarin studies—
including fabrication of data and false description of research methods—
in the published 2002 paper and in other, ongoing work. Hauser ended
up resigning from his Harvard post. It might seem that the study served,
in the end, only to sharpen the conclusion of linguists like Chomsky. But
instead, it led to significant research with another animal that would take
the debate much further.

When University of California, San Diego, neurophysiologist Timothy

Gentner reviewed the tamarin study (prior to the Hauser scandal), he
immediately thought, My birds could do this. He had studied starlings for
years, though he hadn’t come to them through an interest in birds or
birdwatching or ornithological science. He’d come to starlings through
gibbons. Gentner found himself unemployed the summer after he
finished college, and took a volunteer job as a docent at the Woodland
Park Zoo in Seattle. There, he heard the daily vocalizing of the siamangs
—large, black-furred gibbons native to Malaysia, Sumatra, and Thailand.
They’ve been popular primates at the zoo for decades, famous for their
singing. The males and females join in ritualized vocal duets culminating
in the males’ resonant boom, which can be heard, literally, a mile away,
as those of us who have lived in the vicinity of the zoo can attest. Every
day, the inhabitants of all the houses and apartments anywhere near the
zoo have their dinner, their sleep, and their romantic tumbles interrupted
(or enhanced) by the booming of the siamangs.
When Gentner started as a graduate student in psychology at Johns
Hopkins, he couldn’t get the siamangs out of his head; he wanted to
study vocal patterning in animals and perhaps its implications for
humans. His adviser suggested he start with the starlings they had in the
lab, and Gentner never looked back. “The more I learned about these
birds, the more interested I got,” he told me. “And they have never
ceased to amaze me. They are so adaptive, so clever. Every question I
throw at them, they are able to answer, one way or another.” He’d
researched starlings for years by the time the tamarin study came around.
He believed his starlings could recognize the patterns that the tamarins
couldn’t; in fact, he didn’t think it would even be that hard for them.
From his own observations, Gentner knew that both male and female
starlings created wonderful and idiosyncratic songs by mingling an array
of rattles, chirps, and warbles into uniquely patterned motifs and that
they recognized one another as individuals based on these motifs.
“Starlings are so tuned in to sequences. I knew they could do this. It was
just a matter of figuring out how to test it.”
Like Hauser, Gentner created a simple language, but his was based on
starling-ish sounds—warbles and rattles. He tested eleven birds, and
though it sometimes took thousands of trials, nine of the birds learned to
recognize the recursive A(AB)B pattern more than 90 percent of the
time, and with a high degree of proficiency, actually discerning the
pattern when three new pairs of warbles and rattles were embedded
between the original pair.
The implications were ripe for the picking. “Our research is a
refutation of the canonical position that what makes human language
unique is a singular ability to comprehend these kinds of patterns,”
Gentner declared. “If birds can learn these patterning rules, then their use
does not explain the uniqueness of human language.” That is, if a
songbird could recognize recursive syntax patterns, then the place of
recursion in Chomsky’s linguistic views would have to be reconsidered.
And the wild rumpus began. Linguists, psychologists, biologists,
ornithologists, evangelicals. Everyone jumped into the fray initiated by
these tattered little birds—birds so unwanted by the wider world that
Gentner didn’t even need a wildlife permit for his research assistants to
nab them from the trees. The not-yet-debunked Dr. Hauser’s response to
Gentner’s study was seemingly open-minded. He pointed out that
although the starlings could recognize recursive patterns, there was
nothing to indicate that they could comprehend meaning in the patterns,
which is true. (This, of course, would be much harder to study, since
humans do not speak starling, or at least not yet.) But he recognized that
Gentner’s study went far beyond what he was able to show with the
tamarins, acknowledged it as an “important paper,” and claimed that he
was inspired to think about ways he might re-create and improve his
tamarin study by implementing some of Gentner’s methods, perhaps
using tamarin rather than human sounds and giving the monkeys more
tries at listening to the short sentences.
Others, many of them linguists, disagreed strongly with Gentner’s
conclusion. When interviewed for the New York Times, Geoffrey Pullum,
a linguist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-author of
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, said dismissively,
“I’m not buying it.” Pullum argued that the sentences involved in both
the tamarin and starling studies were too simple to be of use in detecting
cognitive abilities that had to do with grammar. It might have told us
something about the abilities of starlings, but it said nothing about the
more complex subject of human language. Yet as Gentner rightly pointed
out on a UK radio program, “Primarily when humans are listening to
acoustic patterns they’re perceiving language.” Here we are talking about
the acoustic recognition of syntactical patterns, a linguistic ability, so if
birds and humans can recognize the same patterns, why—and how—
would we draw a line between them? And as a starting place for
intellectual discourse, why would we? It seems far more expansive, more
respectful of our complex intellect and the potential scientific secrets
residing within the bodies and brains and lives of the creatures with
whom we share the earth, to respond to such a study with our minds
wide open, with a sense of curiosity and adventure.
Gentner described to me some of his new research that seeks to
answer the question of why starlings might have the need for such
advanced pattern-recognition capacities. In this work, he is focusing on
the second part of the starling song, the one that mixes a starling’s
individually collected motifs into a long sequence. This section of the
song has two components: the variety of motifs, and the patterns they
occur in. One thing about starlings that is unusual among songbirds is
that they are open-ended learners. Most songbirds learn their species-
specific calls and songs in the first year, then they’re done—they’ve
successfully learned the “language” of their species. But starlings
continue to learn new sounds, to bring in more sophisticated motifs and
sequences throughout their lives. One morning recently I heard Carmen
making an odd new sound. YEEeeeEEEK! Over and over. “Hi, honey.” I
offered one of her familiar phrases, hoping to distract her from this
unpleasant noise, but she was not to be deterred. I finally figured out
what it was when I was walking past Carmen’s aviary into the dining
room—she was perfectly mimicking the creak in our old oak floor.
Gentner was studying the way starlings of different ages pattern their
motifs into sequences, and he discovered that older birds were more
predictable than younger birds. The sequences of young birds are mostly
random, while the sequences of individual older birds (a one-year-old
versus a four-year-old, for example) are more predetermined. Say you
are listening to a four-year-old male starling. If you have heard this bird
sing before and paid attention to the sequence of his repertoire, then you
can predict fairly well what the eighth (and ninth and tenth) motif will
be. Females, it turns out, prefer such predictability (preference is
measured easily enough by observing which males the females choose as
mates). Older males make better mates by all agreed-upon bird
measures: they declare and defend better and bigger territories, claim
better nest sites, and, together with females, build better nests. They
provide more and better food for their egg-sitting mates and their
eventual chicks. And—the real measure of evolutionary-biological
success—they fledge more young. Thus, life-or-death decisions for the
starling are based on their pattern-recognition ability (and the female’s
leading part in mate choice feeds Gentner’s intuition that females are
slightly better than males at pattern recognition—something he has not
yet been able to measure definitively).
But there is a point of diminishing returns—if a song is too
predictable, it will become less attractive to the female. There appears to
be a balance, a “sweet spot,” Gentner suggests, between novelty and
habituation. Too much novelty is unsettling; too much habituation is
boring. Listening to Gentner talk about all of this, my mind turned to
music, to the use of set motifs and refrains within a changing musical
landscape—enough of both to keep listeners charmed and involved but
still excited and waiting to see what comes next.
 Just as writers use recursion to relieve the monotony of brick-by-
brick sentences, musicians use recursion to allow their music to grow
from within. The most famous example of recursion in beginning music-
theory classes is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, where the familiar da-da-
da-DUM opening can be traced easily via recurrence and variation
throughout the evolution of the movements. Mozart uses musical
recursion frequently. Good music, like a successful starling song,
represents a bounded complexity, and a lot of similar basic aesthetics are
built into the patterning of language, human music, birdsong, and natural
sound.
“I’m thinking of music,” I told Dr. Gentner as we talked about the
balance of predictability and variation in starling songs. “Yeah,” he said,
“me too,” and launched into an esoteric exposition of early versus late
Coltrane, during which I completely spaced out. I was pondering Imogen
Cooper at the piano, wandering through variations on a theme in
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 17.

For the past few months we have had a quiet visitor in our household.
Carmen’s Aunt Trileigh and Uncle Rob (of the Guppy Incident)
generously loaned us their Gnome Chomsky, the garden Noam statuette.
Garden Gnome Chomsky was the first sculpture created by Steve
Herrington for his small Portland, Oregon, company Just Say Gnome!
Their mission: “To create and market garden gnomes… that will bring a
bit of both humor and peace to people’s lives and will hopefully also
inspire deeper political, environmental, and spiritual awareness and
reflection.” We have loved having Gnome Noam here on the living-room
mantel, emanating an aura of combined impishness and wisdom that
captures the real Chomsky well. Like any good gnome statue, Garden
Noam wears a fine red-pointed hat and brown boots, but instead of
standing in a ring of mushrooms, he poses next to a table topped with
scholarly books, wears glasses, and smiles to himself.
I have harbored a fantasy that Carmen would provide an irresistible
photo op by perching on Garden Noam’s little red hat. Dr. Chomsky is
famous for refusing to make personal comments on certain issues, and I
hoped that such an image might inspire him. I would send him the photos
along with my linguistic queries, and he would be charmed into
responding. Instead, Carmen was deathly afraid of Gnome Chomsky and
wouldn’t go anywhere near him for three days; after that, she’d tiptoe
over to investigate only after I put dollops of her favorite peanut-butter-
with-bits-of-arugula on his boots. Eventually she warmed to him, and as
long as I stayed close by, she’d visit Garden Gnome and give his glasses
little exploratory gapes. Contrary as ever, she has refused to sit on his hat
for my imagined photo, but Tom managed to get a few nice shots, one of
which I did send to Dr. Chomsky, who apparently remained unmoved. I
never heard from him and must join the cadre of writers who are forced
to say, “Noam Chomsky declined to comment.” I love the photo anyway.
 Carmen and Gnome Chomsky, the Garden Noam. (Photograph by Tom
Furtwangler)

As it happened, Chomsky’s rejection of the suggestion that Gentner’s

study might invite some re-thinking of his own work was immediate,
complete, and rather truculent. For Chomsky, all the study showed was
starling memory tricks, rattle counting, and number storage (all of which
are rather interesting in a bird, let’s not forget). “It has nothing remotely
to do with language—probably just short-term memory,” Chomsky said
in his terse response to the New York Times. (Later research by Gentner
uses more diversity of patterns and fewer repetitions to counter the
possibility that the starlings are memorizing sounds rather than
recognizing patterns.)
It’s a bit of a sore subject for Chomsky. The starlings are not the first
challenge to his theory that recursion is both unique to humans and
universal to human language. There is a tiny tribe, the Pirahã
(pronounced “pee-da-ha”), living at the mouth of the Amazon. There are
only about three hundred and fifty Pirahã people in twenty or thirty small
villages scattered along the Maici and Marmelos Rivers. They speak no
outside language, and their own tribal tongue—a confounding mixture of
clicks, rattles, lip flicks, air intakes, and birdsong-like bouts of prosody
—have befuddled nearly every linguist to encounter the group, no matter
how many years are given to its study. Surface stats on the language
would lead to the conclusion that it ought to be simple to learn; there are
only eight consonants (females use just seven) and three vowels. But the
need for consonants falls away as tribal members slip into humming,
whistling, and a complex rainbow of tones, stresses, and variations of
syllabic length.
Daniel Everett, a linguist at Bentley University, is the only non-Pirahã
in the world to speak Pirahã. He originally came to the Pirahã in the
1970s as an evangelist working for the Summer Institute of Linguistics,
or SIL, an international group that trains language specialists to translate
the Bible into the tongues of remote tribal groups. The organization
doesn’t attempt a lot of direct evangelization. Their belief is that once
isolated communities get their hands on the Bible in their own language,
their conversions will naturally follow.
In his decades of working with the Pirahã, Everett has slowly come to
understand that as far as he can discern, they have no collective memory,
no original creation mythology, and an insistent denial of complexity
regarding numbers and amounts (the Pirahã recognize only one, two, and
many, and attempts to teach them to count have failed). There is little
grasp of or attention to the past or the future and little concept of the
lives people are living when they are not standing there in the flesh, at
least not in the way most of us typically understand such things. A
person who walks into the woods to go hunting is simply “out of
experience,” says Everett. There is a profound “ethos of the present
moment,” as he calls it.
SIL’s methodology was a failure. (“Have you seen this Christ?” the
Pirahã people asked Everett.) And regarding language, Everett realized
fairly early on that the Pirahã do not use recursion. Later studies by other
linguists (including Hauser’s research partner Tecumseh Fitch, who flew
to the Amazon to do on-the-ground fieldwork) have failed to show that
the Pirahã can recognize recursive patterns. In a new article, Everett
stresses that this is not because the Pirahã lack intelligence; rather, it is
“about the connection between their culture and grammar.”
When he began his graduate studies, Everett was an enthusiastic
disciple of Chomskyan linguistics, but the more he learned about the
Pirahã culture and language, the more he fell away from his adherence to
the notion of Universal Grammar. The Pirahã language, he came to
insist, is a “severe counterexample” to UG, and he stressed his further
belief that the Pirahã are not an isolated case but that scholars don’t
know of more exceptions because the entrenched linguistic theory has
for so long stifled the impulse to inquire. “I think one of the reasons that
we haven’t found other groups like this,” Everett said in an interview for
the New Yorker, “is because we’ve been told, basically, that it’s not
possible.” In the face of Everett’s ongoing research, Chomsky continued
to insist that “there is no coherent alternative” to UG.
Outside of linguistics, I follow Chomsky’s political activism and
commentary with interest. But I cannot mourn Universal Grammar’s
decline in the evolving field of modern linguistics. It is increasingly
viewed as misguided and outworn at best and, some argue,
unintentionally racist at worst. Obviously Chomsky would never have
envisioned such a reading. But if the Pirahã do not recognize recursion,
then making an absolute link between recursion and human language
could certainly be interpreted as a diminishing of their humanity and that
of any other tribal groups like them.
Gentner was not surprised by Chomsky’s response to his starling
studies, but he was disappointed that the negative reaction appeared to be
based on personal attachment to a particular view rather than on stringent
science. The starting process in Fitch, Hauser, and Chomsky’s “The
Faculty of Language” paper—the process of elimination that led the
researchers to suggest the uniqueness of recursion—presumes a level of
knowledge about what is happening in animal consciousness,
communication, vocalization, and pattern recognition that is far beyond
the human capacity to fully understand, both in 2002 when the paper was
published and today. To presuppose that it is possible for three men to
determine exactly what every earthly human group and animal species
can or cannot accomplish in their communication is to begin from a
place of astonishing hubris, an overstatement of what we do know, and
surely also an overreach of what we can know.
No one is suggesting that human language is not unique and
wonderful. As Gentner told me, “There will never be a nonhuman that
can model human language, but until we can understand some
mechanism that is shared across species, we can’t even start to ask what
is unique about human language.” Yet we find that even among the most
liberal intellectuals, there persists a notion that humans and human
abilities must somehow remain at the center of the universe. The
research on starling vocalizations and recursive pattern recognition
pushes humans a little further off our self-created pedestal and deeper
into the delightful mix of creatures that is the earth’s truest symphony.
We are at the edge of a new paradigm shift in the nature of scientific
discourse, and we are being led by one of the world’s most common,
most reviled birds.

Darwin believed that all human capacities have an ancestral pathway,

which of course makes evolutionary sense. There is no reason to tease
out our consciousness in general, or our language in particular, from the
wondrous, graced, earthen tangle in which we live. He wrote in The
Descent of Man, “The sounds uttered by birds offer in several aspects the
nearest analogy to language.” That was 1871. Now researchers are
observing that the pattern of vocal learning in human infants—from
babbling to forming words to developing words into phrases and
sentences—mirrors the way young birds learn their songs from adults.
Duke University neuroscientist Erich Jarvis recently published an
unprecedented study in the journal Science that mapped the genomes of
forty-eight different species of birds. Jarvis had always been interested in
avian voices, and determined years ago that the way birds learn song
patterns seems to parallel the way humans learn to form words. He was
hoping that his genetic research would expand on other work showing
similar parts of human and avian brains are involved in vocal patterning.
The results surprised even him. Jarvis and his co-researchers found fifty
overlapping genes in humans and birds that correlate with vocal learning.
In birds that were more adept at learning new songs, these genes were
more often expressed. Jarvis’s conclusions are momentous: “This means
that vocal learning in birds and humans are more similar to each other
for these genes in song and speech brain areas than other birds and
primates are to them.” There is at least one way that I am more
biologically similar to little Carmen than I am to a chimp, the nearest
animal relative of Homo sapiens.
The basic brain structure that we share with other animals, including
birds, is ancient, predating complex communication. This suggests that
the commonalities in our modern brains and genes around language are
more likely to stem from convergent evolution—where two organisms
evolve a similar physical characteristic in parallel—rather than from a
close evolutionary relationship. But it’s far easier to study birds long
term in a lab than it is to study humans, and Jarvis hopes his and others’
new work will shed light on the murky topic of language evolution. We
have a fossil record to teach us about physical evolution, but we have no
recordings of humans speaking seventy thousand years ago. If birds and
humans learn language similarly now, it is possible that our evolutionary
pathways to language have run much the same course.

While the reaction to Gentner’s starling research from some linguists

was negative, the response from the public was enthusiastic. His work
was initially published in a scientific journal, but it got picked up by
numerous public radio stations and was summarized in popular
magazines and newspapers—more than usual for such a paper. This is
not so surprising. I believe that it is a natural human tendency to seek
and to recognize connection across species boundaries. We are delighted
when things we know to be true in our hearts and our bones are validated
by science.
In 2012 an international consortium of prominent scientists signed a
document called “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness,” in
which they proclaimed that animals, from birds to mammals to
octopuses, possess consciousness similar to humans’. The paper stands at
the forefront of what is said to be a new and more enlightened
understanding. It is wonderful that animal consciousness is finally being
recognized as respectable within high scientific discourse, and I hope
that this paper and work like it will help ground a higher standard of
ethics for animal treatment in science, agriculture, and entertainment.
But I cannot help but think that as an academic declaration, it comes a bit
late. Darwin made the same claim in print 162 years prior. And do most
of us really need a scientific document to inform us that the animals we
live with are conscious beings? I believe that the human sense of
connection with the more-than-human world is innate and joyous. It is
our truest way of being, of dwelling, of relating. It is not new; it is very
old. It surfaces in the art and culture of every civilization across place
and time—in stories of human-animal relationships that are based on
respect, awareness, knowledge, and love.
I have no desire to confer on any animal a capacity that it doesn’t
have. There is no need. Animals have capacities enough—those we do
understand, those we do not yet know, those we can never know because
they reside in the unique minds of other-than-human beings. Starlings
gather knowledge of their world by gaping. Parrots learn with their
tongues, raccoons with the sensitive pads on the palms of their front
paws, earthworms with their shining skins. “We lie in the lap of immense
intelligence,” wrote Emerson, “which makes us receivers of its truth and
organs of its activity.” And to me, this is the beauty of Gentner’s work,
and work like his. It reminds us of the creative awareness, at once
scientific and poetic, that we stand on a continuum of being, of life. That
we are part and parcel, along with every creature that crosses our path, of
a fierce and beautiful intelligence.
 Interlude

THE HEART OF TIME FOR BIRDS AND

MOZART

Conductor Michel Swierczewski said of Mozart, “I have a theory that

he is someone who lived faster than other people… When I think of his
life as a film, I always see it as an accelerated movie.” I have long held
the same notion. By the time of Mozart’s final illness and early passing,
at age thirty-four, he had witnessed the death of his mother, his father,
and four of his children, had suffered financial highs and lows, and had
experienced the exuberance and anxious depression characteristic of
artistic brilliance, all while composing quartets, quintets, symphonies,
concertos, masses, dances, quadrilles, several of the finest operas ever
written, and a beautiful requiem, the pages laid out across his lap as he
died. Lessons, conducting, concerts, concertmastering, court composing.
Thousands upon thousands of pages of manuscript written, copied over,
published. Thousands of letters sent far and near. Thousands of miles
traveled by horse-drawn carriage.
Certainly, in terms of the conditions of daily existence, Mozart was
no different from the typical Viennese of his time. But in the pace of his
work, juxtaposed with the hardship of his personal life and the
complexity of his artist’s mind, he was anything but typical. It is as if the
space of a life opened wider in order to contain him.
New research confirms something that I have always believed to be
possible. For smaller animals, time is perceived in slow motion. In a
2013 study published in Animal Behaviour, researchers at Trinity College
in Dublin used flashing lights to determine the temporal resolution at
which information can be processed by a variety of species. They learned
that animals with smaller bodies and higher metabolisms (like houseflies
or birds) perceive and process more information in a unit of time than
larger animals with slower metabolisms (like elephants or humans). This
is why, when we think we are being so sneaky with the rolled-up
newspaper, the fly gets away most of the time—the sequence of events is
unfolding more slowly for the fly. One commentator likened the effect to
the “bullet time” sequence in the film The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves
dodges the bullets coming at him in seeming slow motion while his
coattails toss in the wind. To the shooter, the bullets are going at full
speed, but in the Matrix, Reeves’s character can duck the slow-moving
bullets easily. According to this new study, birds live in the Matrix.
The implications of this research take us far beyond the notion of dog
years—the idea that the lives of shorter-lived animals proceed at a pace
that can be measured against a human time scale to find a comparable
person-age. Instead, we are invited to think far more expansively and
relativistically about time. I am not suggesting that a bird, say, with her
fleet heart, experiences more in a short life of three years than we do in
that same period but that her actual perceived life may be longer than
three years. The measure is mysterious; the time of the bird’s life
expands beyond our typical calculation in ways that we cannot
understand, at least not yet. Is it possible that some people, too,
experience this time/space portal, allowing more experience to billow
within and around them? That we can tot up the length of certain lives in
our usual linear fashion but that these lives do not fit into this linear
measure, that more, somehow, has been lived?
The potential for such experience is woven into our cultural
mythologies. In the Western archive, we find Faerie, a realm into which
one might enter through chance or mishap or, often, flute music. Faerie is
the place where worlds meet—wild and domestic, dream and reality,
language and poetry, human footsteps overlaid upon those of woodland
creatures and leaves and mushrooms. It is the land of the imagination,
and of the suspension of time, of the practical interlaced with the
magical. Certainly it is the world of The Magic Flute.
Sometimes when Carmen sits on my shoulder, I close my eyes and
listen. She weighs nothing; were it not for the tiny prick of her toenails I
might not even know she was there. If all is quiet, and my ear is close
enough to her warm feathered breast, I can hear her heartbeat. My heart
rate, like Mozart’s and most humans’, is about 80 beats per minute.
Carmen’s, like Star’s and most songbirds’, is about 450 beats per minute.
Larger birds have slower heart rates (chickens’ are about 245); smaller
birds have faster ones (hummingbirds’ are about 1,000). I put my hand
on my heart and my ear to Carmen’s breast and feel the pace of our two
lives coursing by.
The metronome was patented by German inventor Johann Maelzel in
1815. All dedicated students of music are subject to its tyranny, but most
composers continue to resist suggesting exact tempos for their work.
Instead, the tempos at the top of a musical score are descriptive,
suggestive, subjective, and highly relative. Allegretto (fairly brisk, but
not fast), allegro non troppo (fast, but not too fast), lentissimo (slower
than slow). We know that music can bend and change our perception of
time, and myriad studies show how easy it is for humans to fall into a
changed relationship with time when listening to skillfully composed
music. The UK’s Royal Automobile Club even determined the most
dangerous music to listen to while driving: Wagner’s “Ride of the
Valkyries.” Evidently, the risk is not that the listener becomes
overinvolved in the music or that the music itself is too fast, but that the
ecstatic nature of the music interrupts drivers’ normal sense of speed,
causing them to unconsciously drive faster.
The late Welsh poet John O’Donohue believed that “music is,
perhaps, the art form that brings us closest to the eternal because it
changes immediately and irreversibly the way we experience time.”
This, he felt, creates a bridge between the visible world and the invisible,
or the imaginal, as it is called in the scholarship, where our usual
measures make little sense. Mozart lived in this world of music, with
ever-changing tempos in his head and a starling on his shoulder. Could it
be that his experience of the passing of time was unique, that time
unfolded for him in a distinctive, idiosyncratic way? I like to imagine
that he experienced the interval of his own swift life with the expanded
heart-time of a bird.
 Eight

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

In June of 1787, Mozart entered a new composition, Ein musikalischer

Spass, or A Musical Joke, into his catalog of completed works—the first
piece he had finished since the death of his father and then his starling.
The work is now designated K. 522, and is an unusual chamber ensemble
for two French horns, two violins, viola, and bass. Mozart never shied
away from complexity, but we know from his words and music that he
was always against disharmony. This divertimento is a Mozartian
anomaly, lurching wildly and unpredictably between keys and sprinkled
with discordant accidentals. At the time of its publication, the piece was
not given much regard as serious music, and those who paid it any mind
believed that it was meant to parody the ineptitude of the current musical
establishment or was perhaps even a spoof of a particular composer. It is
rumored that Czech composer Leopold Koželuch actually attacked
Mozart on a visit to Prague, convinced that he was the parodied artist.
It has been a great sadness to me, and a kind of irony, that Carmen
takes almost no interest in Mozart’s music. I did, after all, pluck her from
her nest and raise her from a scrawny, dying nestling to study a starling’s
relationship to the great composer. I wouldn’t mind so much if she didn’t
seem interested in music at all, but she loves almost all other music. All
except Mozart’s—or most of Mozart’s. As I mentioned, she does at least
enjoy the final movement of Star’s concerto. But there is one other
Mozart composition that she dearly loves, and to me it seems another
dimension of Mozart’s Joke—as if he has reached beyond the grave to
play one last trick. This starling I live with, this supposed kindred spirit
to the maestro, sits blithely plucking at her feathers while Mozart’s
sublime Mass in C Minor drifts from the stereo speakers. But the much-
maligned, musically dubious divertimento, the Musical Joke? Carmen
leaps to life like an opera hero. She tilts her head. She looks at me as if
something wild is happening and she expects that I, too, should
recognize it. And if she is truly carried away, she will toss her little head
back and sing. After that she will look at me again as if to say, Was that
good? It’s so cute and innocent it almost breaks my heart. I want to be
annoyed, but instead I give her a kiss on the neck, which she hates. She
fluffs the kiss off. “Very pretty,” I tell her.
After Mozart’s death, when his music was being passed around and
played in his honor, musicians were reluctant to perform A Musical Joke
because it made them sound incompetent; modern musicians are equally
unenthusiastic. Some contemporary musicologists agree with the parody
theory. Some feel that Wolfgang was working through his relationship
with his father, who had died the previous month (though I find it
doubtful that he would have treated this subject comically so soon after
Leopold’s death, or ever). Some think it contains a hidden message not
yet understood. Some are convinced that this was an instance in which
Mozart simply lost his way and created a superficial piece, lacking in
significance. Most just find it unlistenable. Liner notes from a Deutsche
Grammophon recording sum up the popular view: “In the first movement
we hear the awkward, unproportioned, and illogical piecing together of
uninspired material… the andante cantabile contains a grotesque
cadenza, which goes on far too long and pretentiously ends with a
comical deep pizzicato.” By the end, the commentator declares, Mozart
is writing like an “amateur composer” who “has lost all control of his
incongruous mixture.”
Such pronouncements suggest that the entire piece is a bizarre horror
when in actuality there is much to enjoy—the composition on the whole
is lighthearted and there are moments of bright energy and sweetness,
especially the triplet-driven opening of the allegro, a section that makes
me want to get up and twirl. If there seems to be a loss of control, as
suggested by the Deutsche Grammophon author, I would argue it is a
tightly controlled appearance of disorganization, which a true amateur
could never pull off. Even so, Mozart didn’t mean for the composition to
represent his serious side. It was a playful piece with a riddle at its
center: Where did this wild voice come from?
The description of this music should sound familiar. I have
experimented with playing the most objectionable cadenzas from A
Musical Joke alongside the recorded vocalizations of a starling who has
lost himself in one of his long, rambling utterances and with Carmen’s
own singing. The melodies, or “unmelodies,” of the quintet excerpts and
the starling songs can be perfectly overlaid. I am not the first to notice
the resemblance. When Meredith West and her husband, Andrew King,
were pondering the subject of Mozart’s starling while raising starlings of
their own for research, the comparison became irresistible. The pair were
students of animal behavior, not musicologists or Mozart historians, and
with their fresh ears, they could detect something that centuries of
musical commentary had overlooked. A Musical Joke, the researchers
asserted in 1990, bears “the vocal autograph of the starling.” They noted
the fractured phrases, the tendency of starlings to respond to songs they
have heard by singing them back off-key, to repeat parts that seem to
have gone on long enough, and to delete parts that seem essential to the
human ear. (One of the birds in West’s study loved to mimic part of a
song it heard in the household: Way down upon the Swa—! That was it.
No matter how many times the starling heard the song, nothing could
convince it to add-nee River.) On top of all this, starlings flexibly and
unpredictably combine and recombine phrases, just as Mozart does in
this piece, while tossing in starling-esque whistles and squeals. As
Meredith West wrote in response to the Deutsche Grammophon
commentator:

“The illogical piecing together”—in keeping with the starlings’

intertwining of whistled tunes. The “awkwardness” could be due
to the starlings’ tendencies to whistle off-key or to fracture
musical phrases at unexpected points. The presence of drawn-out,
wandering phrases of uncertain structure is characteristic of
starling soliloquies. Finally, the abrupt end, as if the instruments
had simply ceased to work, has the signature of starlings written
all over it.

Revered ornithologist Luis Baptista of the California Academy of

Sciences ordained the view. The piece that flummoxed musicologists,
claimed Baptista, certainly does mimic the starling’s innate vocal
tendencies. He adds to the conversation by noting that the final cadence
of the Joke is composed in a two-voice counterpoint—a Bach-ian
element, but also a birdlike one. The structure of the syrinx (the avian
version of the larynx) allows many songbirds, including starlings, to sing
two and sometimes even more notes or tones at the same time (a
technique perfected in the flute songs of thrushes). Baptista suggests that
the counterpoint is another proof of starling influence, and I believe him.
But I believe, too, that this cadence also represents the playfully joined
voices of composer and bird.
As further substantiation of Star’s influence on the sextet, we now
know that A Musical Joke was composed in bits and pieces during the
three-year period that Mozart lived with Star, and it was completed soon
after the starling’s death. Thus, the piece morphs from musical error into
musical eulogy—Mozart’s idiosyncratic gift and tribute to the bird
whose little life twined so thoroughly with his own. The affinity was an
honest one. Bird and composer had much in common. Both maestro and
starling shared an astonishing likeness in talents (mimicry, vocal play,
musical gymnastics), personality (busy-ness, silliness, flirtatiousness,
tomfoolery), and social priorities (attention-seeking!).
Like other members of his species, Star was flirtatious and prone to
bursting into song, as was Mozart himself, who is said to have wandered
eccentrically about, muttering in a musical recitative, a habit both
operatic and birdlike. Like Star, Mozart was a gifted mimic. Certainly he
could imitate any musical style in his compositions, and regularly did; he
was commissioned to create particular styles of work for church or
official occasions throughout his career. But he could also, even as a
child, vocally imitate any of the prevailing opera seria styles in ranges
from tenor to full soprano. When Mozart bragged in a letter to his father,
“I can, as you know, pretty much adopt and imitate any form and style of
composition,” Leopold replied, “I know your capabilities. You can
imitate anything.”
As a child, Mozart was as wide-eared as a starling, swiftly learning
new languages and absorbing musical styles and influences in his travels,
and he would forever use modeling, imitation, and parody playfully and
gorgeously in his own compositions. Always the impresario, Leopold
urged Wolfgang to use this skill to professional advantage, and he did.
But Wolfgang also mimicked for fun, enlivening parties with his vocal
and physical impressions of friends, other musicians, and even the
emperor. He was surely surprised and delighted by the ever-changing,
ever-mischievous vocal capacities of his pet, so much like his own. In
their shared vocal play, their clever backing-and-forthing of aural
possibility, Mozart found the closest thing to an avian kindred spirit that
the green earth had to offer. A bird playmate evolved, it seems, just for
him.

The other day, Claire and I were browsing at Pegasus, our wonderful
neighborhood used bookstore, she at the Austen/Brontë shelf, I close by
in Willa Cather, when I heard her whisper in teenage horror, “Mom, you
have bird poop in your hair.” I have lost count of the times she has had
to make such proclamations in public, and they never cease to scandalize
her. I’ve come to be rather philosophical about it. What can one do?
Carmen sits on my head half the day, so naturally she poops there, and
guano in the tresses is tricky business. While starling excrement wipes
easily from a nonporous surface, the best way to get it out of your hair is
to pick the solid bits off with tissue paper and let the rest dry, at which
point it can easily be combed out. Usually, though, I forget about it, and
it sort of blends in until the next shampoo.
When I spoke with Tim Gentner about his starling grammar research,
the conversation came around to Carmen, and he was intrigued. Though
he has worked with hundreds of captive starlings, he has never lived with
one flying around his house. The things that usually surprise people
about Carmen (that she’s pretty, smart, tame, and can talk) are of course
well known to Gentner. So I was amused by his question “Doesn’t she
make a mess?” By which he really meant: Isn’t there poop all over your
house?
Well, yes and no. Like all birds that do a lot of flying, starlings poop a
lot. It’s adaptive, essential in keeping their weight down for optimal
aerodynamics. When a little waste accumulates in the intestines, they
poop it right out to stay clean, light, and flight weight. Compare this
strategy to a bird like a loon, say, or a cormorant—one that doesn’t fly
much but dives for a living and needs to be heavy and un-buoyant. These
birds accumulate great stores of waste, which they eventually eliminate
in shocking streams that float like rafts on the surface of the water;
seeing them, you might think a whale had passed by. Though starlings
defecate more frequently, their droppings are low volume. Most of the
bird excreta we see on urban and suburban sidewalks come from birds
like crows and pigeons—bigger birds with droppings that are substantial
enough to stick around for a few hours or a day. But starlings and most
other urban songbirds are smaller-bodied. Their poops blend in with the
grass and the dirt, quickly wash away in a rain sprinkle, or are otherwise
absorbed into the substrate.*
The issue is more problematic for an indoor bird. Though I allow
Carmen to fly freely as much as possible, she still spends a lot of time in
her aviary and is there overnight, so that is where most of her droppings
accumulate. I make sure that the newspapers lining the floor are changed
every day and that her perches are scrubbed. As far as the rest of the
house goes, recall that starlings are remarkably social. Carmen does not
care to be flapping about the house by herself, exploring. She wants to be
with us, on us. And since I am Carmen’s primary caregiver, that’s where
her poop goes. On me. Or at least within arm’s reach. I always have a
square of tissue in hand, ready to wipe up any fresh pooplets that drop
onto my computer screen or the floor or the book I am reading. I have an
old shirt, now dubbed the poop shirt, which I pull over the top of
whatever I’m wearing when I let Carmen out of her aviary. It’s an
imperfect system. I often forget to don the poop shirt, and when I take
off my clothes to change into my pajamas at night, I discover that I have
been wandering about all day with a healthy dollop of Carmen’s doo-doo
on the back of my sweater.
Friends or historians sometimes bring up the fact of random poop as
an argument against my firm belief that Star was let out to fly freely in
Mozart’s study. Surely this would not have been allowed in a decorous
eighteenth-century home, even one as eccentric as the Mozarts’? But a
little starling poop here and there would not have fazed Mozart or his
family in the least. Mozart was happily conversant with digestive
matters. When Peter Hall, director of the play Amadeus, spoke with
Margaret Thatcher after a performance, he was bemused to discover that
she was horrified by the maestro’s vulgarity of manner as it was
portrayed in this production. Evidently, the prime minister was not
known as a patron of the dramatic arts; the premiere of Amadeus was the
first time she had ventured to the theater in some fifteen years, and this
because she was a fan not of theater, but of Mozart. Hall wrote of
Thatcher’s response to the performance in the introduction to a later
edition of Peter Shaffer’s play: “She was not pleased. In her best
headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play
that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter
words.” Thatcher proclaimed it inconceivable that the man who wrote
such “exquisite and elegant music” could be so foulmouthed. But while
Amadeus does take many historical liberties, this is not one of them. Hall
politely attempted to bring Mrs. Thatcher up to speed on the contents of
Mozart’s letters but was told, “I don’t think you heard what I said. He
couldn’t have been like that.” And Hall had no choice but to concede:
“The Prime Minister insisted that I was wrong, so wrong I was.”
Mozart reveled in toilet humor, a predilection he came by honestly;
potty talk was a regular part of his upbringing. Naturally there was the
usual playful poo-jesting between brother and sister, both at home and in
letters while they were apart, but such humor continued long beyond
childhood. Mozart’s scatological jokes are often tossed off as part and
parcel of the poor taste of adolescence, his overall immaturity, or perhaps
even a kind of pathology. But excrement was a standard subject of
conversation and joking between the seemingly straitlaced Leopold and
the proper Anna Maria as well. When Wolfgang and his mother left for
their European tour in 1777 (none of the family dreaming that Anna
Maria would die in Paris), she assured her fretting husband in a letter
along the way, “Don’t worry, darling, everything will come right in the
end. I wish you good night, my dear, but first, shit in your bed and make
it burst.” (Emphasis mine.) This wording appears also in letters from the
ostensibly prudish Leopold to his wife and son, and from Wolfgang to
his first lover, cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart (the Bäsle, or “little
cousin,” as Wolfgang called her), whom he visited in Augsburg. As far
as I have been able to determine, this is not a historical idiom but simply
a lighthearted, and rather weird, family meme.
In a letter to the Bäsle, Wolfgang wrote, after a parade of other
silliness, “Oui, oui, by love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs
down your chin.” And further along: “I now wish you a good night, shit
in your bed with all your might, sleep with peace on your mind, and try
to kiss your own behind.” And after pages of linguistic feats displaying a
wild wit and questionable taste, the young maestro turned to fart jokes.
 Now I must relate to you a sad story that happened just this
minute. As I’m in the middle of my best writing, I hear a noise in
the street. I stop writing—get up, go to the window—and—the
noise is gone—I sit down again, start writing once more—I have
barely written 10 words when I hear the noise again—I rise—but
as I rise, I can still hear something but very faint—it smells like
something burning—wherever I go it stinks, when I look out the
window, the smell goes away, when I turn my head back to the
room, the smell comes back—finally My Mama says to me: I bet
you let one go?—I don’t think so, Mama. Yes, yes, I’m quite
certain. I put it to the test, stick my finger in my ass, then put it to
my nose, and—Ecce Provatum est!* Mama was right! Now
farewell, I kiss you 10000 times.

When Constanze shared the Bäsle letters with Franz Niemetschek for
his early biography, she wrote an accompanying note: “Although in
dubious taste, the letters to his cousin are full of wit and deserve
mentioning, although they cannot of course be published in their
entirety.”
I decidedly disagree with Hall’s conclusion in his introduction to
Shaffer’s play that Mozart had an “infantile sense of humor” and
“protected himself from maturity by indulging his childishness.”
Mozart’s scatological bent is part of a wide-ranging wordplay that was
bawdy and might have been immature in some ways, but in my view, the
response of the entire Mozart family to an essential element of the
human condition shows acceptance, wit, and a sense of humor that is
more indicative of playful intelligence than actual puerility.
Subscribers to the Sublime Mozart myth are naturally horrified, but in
truth things may not be as bad as they seem. The Mozarts did not live in
a whitewashed modern society—there was no water in the homes, no
pipe systems, however rudimentary, no toilets of any kind. The facts of
the body were close to the surface of everyday life. Nor was eighteenth-
century Salzburg the laced-up theater of manners of the coming
Victorian era; there was more room for casual jocularity.
And yet, even with such allowances, was the Mozart family’s toilet
humor—what would you say—normal? Probably not entirely. This talk
is a bit coarse by any social standard, and for this reason, it offers a
wonderful insight into the family. For two hundred years, we have
unquestioningly swallowed the proffered image of Leopold as an uptight
patriarch at the helm of a rigidly controlled family, and yet in the
Mozarts’ letters and ephemera and portraits, another image emerges.
Here was a family that was intelligent and hardworking and concerned
with status and success, yes, but also one that was comfortable together,
that was jolly, silly, fun, and a bit raucous. All of us grew up visiting the
houses of our friends and their parents, where we learned that there were
families that made fart jokes and families that did not. The Mozarts were
the sort that did.
And so, for Mozart, the finger-smeller, the shit-burster, surely the tiny
droppings that issued from Star, quickly wiped up, would have been
nothing at all. Mozart composed on good paper, and it would have been
easier to clean Star’s droppings from his compositions in progress than it
is for me to wipe them from my modern, poor-quality copy paper. Fair
copies of manuscripts would have been kept away from the bird, just as I
keep my beloved old leather diary, my complete Emily Dickinson, and
other treasures out of arm’s reach when Carmen is in my study (though
they can stay out on the shelves and do not have to be put away
completely—as I say, she doesn’t venture much from my shoulder).
Mozart’s ink bottle would have had to be minded, but overall I expect
Mozart had it easier with his bird than I do with mine. I am just waiting
for my MacBook Pro to fizzle and short from fresh, liquidy Carmen poo
sliding between the keys. When I took it into the shop because it was
overheating and the fan was making a thumpa-thumpa-thumpa sound,
the tech took it apart and showed me the “food” that was stuck in the
mechanism. “Um, yeah,” I confessed, “that’s actually starling poop.”
With no apparent sense of humor at all, he brushed the fan clean and sold
me a rubber keyboard cover.

Mozart’s wordplay was not limited to bodily functions. In the above-

quoted letter to the Bäsle, Wolfgang takes a flight of astonishing
epistolary fancy. The whole letter becomes a Spiel, a play, a playground.
It does convey the kinds of thoughts and details of daily life typically
found in a missive between dear young friends or lovers, but for the most
part, it is a tumble of internal rhyming, verbal mirroring, echoes,
synonyms, and puns that defy translation. It is nonsensical, but
calculated nonsense, a sort of Alice in Wonderland letter, never mere
blather, but a work of stunning, charming, goofy intelligence. From the
greeting (“Dearest cozz bozz”), to the sign-off (his usual “I kiss you
10000 times,” as he concluded almost every letter he ever wrote to his
loved ones, though the number was sometimes one thousand or one
hundred thousand or even a million), to the signature (“Old young
Sauschwanz, Wolfgang Amadé Rosenkranz”*), there is never a dull
moment in this long letter. “I have received reprieved your highly
esteemed writing biting, and I have noted doted that my uncle gafuncle,
my aunt slant, and you too are all well mell. We too, thank god, are in
good fettle kettle. Today I got the letter setter from my Papa Haha safely
into my paws claws.”
Wolfgang makes fun of the Bäsle’s declaration of affection in her
recent letter: “You let it out, you expose yourself, you let yourself be
heard, you give me notice, you declare yourself, you indicate to me, you
bring me the news, you announce onto me, you state in broad daylight,
you demand, you desire, you wish, you want, you like, you command
that I, too, should send you my Portrait.” But then he gives in with
flirtatious nonchalance. “Eh bien, I shall mail fail it for sure.”
And while Mozart was at his freest in this note to his beloved cousin-
lover, there is no shortage of linguistic acrobatics in the rest of his
correspondence, and throughout his life. He slips so swiftly and agilely
from his native German to riffs in English, Italian, French, and Latin, and
tosses in his rhymes and puns so effortlessly that one could almost miss
the fact that anything beyond the usual is going on. His most regular
correspondent was his father, Leopold, who would worry and scold and
demand news if he did not hear from Wolfgang frequently. Every letter,
always, began with a rhyme, “Mon très cher père,” and was signed with
“I kiss your hands 1000 times”. He wrote to Nannerl on the occasion of
her marriage in 1784 (just a few months after Mozart moved with his
family and starling to the Domgasse apartment): “Ma très chère soeur!
Good gracious! It’s high time for me to write to you if I want my letter to
still reach you as a virgin! A few days later and—it’s gone!” He sends
congratulations and pleasantries and travel plans and concludes with
explicit marital advice (which takes a feminist turn) in rhyming,
rambling, iambic pentameter:
 So, if your husband shows you cool reserve,
Which you feel you do not deserve,
But he, with knotted brow, thinks he’s right:
Just tell yourself, well it’s his way,
And say: yes, Master, thy will be done by day
But my will shall be done at night.*

In February of 1786, Wolfgang attended a masked ball disguised as

an Indian philosopher. He handed out pamphlets filled with clever
riddles he had written himself, styled after the works of Iranian
philosopher Zoroaster (the model for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and also
probably for Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte). Wolfgang sent a copy to his
father, and you can almost hear Leopold giggling with approval when he
sent it along to Nannerl at her home in St. Gilgen: “The enclosure I’m
sending you came from your brother. I solved the first 7 riddles right
away just by reading them but the 8th is hard. These fragments are good
and true. I suppose they are for moral edification… Please let me have
the pamphlet back.”**
Beyond all the chattering and wordplay, there is one similarity
between Mozart and starlings that I would never have guessed. It is
known that Mozart enjoyed drinking and was prone to tipsiness at
parties. I cannot speak for Star, but wine is Carmen’s favorite thing in her
known world. She’ll steal a sip any chance she can get, and we’ve
discovered that she can even tell a wineglass from other vessels. If we
line up a series of empty glasses on the counter—juice glass, water
goblet, wineglass—she will fly straight to the wineglass and poke her bill
down to the very bottom, seeking her sweet elixir and spreading her
wings to keep her balance. If the cupboard is open for even a second, she
zips straight to the wineglass shelf and knocks the flute nearest the edge
to its death on the slate floor. Whenever we need to catch her to clip her
toenails or accomplish some other starling-maintenance task, we just
pour a little wine in the bottom of a glass and grab her when she is bill-
down and tail-up. It’s too easy. And though after such a stunt on our part,
she will attempt to control herself and avoid wineglasses for a couple of
days, in the long run it is too much for her. Her alcoholic tendencies
overwhelm her suspicions regarding our motives. Occasionally I relent
and share a little Cabernet from my own glass (just a bit—it’s not good
for her, and the last thing I need is a drunken starling flopping about). I
love my vision of Mozart doing the same with Star.

Way back when I began exploring this story, I had no doubt that Mozart
and his starling pet would find common ground in their adventurous
vocalizing and musicality. But the more I have discovered of Mozart’s
personality and the more I learn about starlings by living with Carmen,
the more I find the similarities between Mozart and Star to be more
extreme than I’d ever dreamed: the unusual cleverness, the playful
disobedience, the propensity for almost ceaseless chatter. Both were
fluttering and curious and disorderly. Both were incapable of being still
and quiet in a world so full of sound and happenings and beauty. Both
shared the impulse to make wild, original, constant music.*
Beyond A Musical Joke, no one has suggested further direct
connections between Mozart’s starling and a particular piece of music.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. To the alert listener, I believe the
lasting influence of Star on Mozart’s work is everywhere in evidence. An
infinity of birdlike phrases visit his later work. In arias composed for
some of Mozart’s rascally opera heroes, there are bouts of starling-esque
mischief. And I do not think it is a simple coincidence that, after Star’s
death, a character appears in the Mozart canon that charmingly embodies
all the shared personality quirks of both maestro and bird.
Mozart composed much of his opera Die Zauberflöte, or The Magic
Flute, in a tiny cottage set in the rose garden of Salzburg’s Mirabell
Palace, windows open to the sounds of birds and the cycles of nature that
surface in the opera. This is the same garden where the von Trapp
children twirled in the film The Sound of Music, wearing their curtain
clothes and singing “Do Re Mi.” The cottage still stands, but I was
distressed to find it closed and padlocked for restoration when I was in
Salzburg. I was still able to tiptoe around the cottage edges. After doing
a little twirl of my own among the roses, I sat quietly and listened to the
garden birds. These are the same species that Mozart heard as he
composed (European robin, long-tailed tit, chaffinch, blackbird). I
couldn’t help whispering to them: “The souls of your ancestors still fly in
the arias of The Magic Flute.”
 Die Zauberflöte’s ponderous libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, with
its Masonic overtones and dragging plot, is saved by two things: some of
the most soaring operatic arias ever composed, and the comic presence
of the character Papageno. Papageno appears in costume, a flurry of
feathers—he is a bird catcher by trade, but in person more of an actual
bird. In the opening scene, the opera’s purported hero Tamino faints after
being chased by a giant serpent. He is saved by the Queen of the Night’s
maidens, but when he awakens, only Papageno is there. “What are you?”
Tamino wonders, noting Papageno’s feathery garb and flittish demeanor.
“Me?” Papageno is incredulous. “I’m a human being, like you,” he
replies with a sidelong glance that leaves us all in doubt. When Tamino
credits Papageno for his rescue, the bird catcher doesn’t bother to correct
him. The maidens return and punish Papageno for this falsehood by
putting a padlock on his mouth. The worst of penances! Throughout the
opera, there is a running gag that Papageno cannot keep from
“chattering.” The character of Papageno is social, charming, busy,
strange, feathery, musically adept, unpredictable, troublesome yet
delightful—it is not difficult to see where the inspiration for Papageno
arose in Mozart’s life. Papageno leaps about, unsure and aflutter,
meaning well but getting into all manner of mischief. He is the Coyote-
Trickster, the Shakespearean fool, his buffoonery masking his
intelligence and capability. Everyone is in raptures over the supposed
bravery of handsome Prince Tamino, but it is Papageno, not Tamino,
who twice saves the heroine Pamina from being raped, and it is
Papageno who finds the voice to join her in a powerful duet that sings
love into existence.
The librettist Emanuel Schikaneder was a bit of a character. He had
run a traveling theater and was himself a motley mix of impresario,
playwright, player, and roustabout. In 1791 he settled in Vienna to run
the Theater auf der Wieden, and here he renewed his long friendship
with Mozart. It was Schikaneder’s idea for them to collaborate on this
new singspiel (or play with music—there are more speaking parts in Die
Zauberflöte than in strict operas, where all speaking parts are sung in
recitative). The librettist had a rich baritone and cast himself to play
Papageno in the initial production. By all accounts, Schikaneder had a
lively stage presence and doubtless made a wonderful bird catcher.
Mozart kept the arias simple enough for Schikaneder’s range, which was
not as extensive as a professional opera singer’s, but Papageno’s
melodies are so lovely, the sentiments so human and true, and the
baritone voice so inherently gorgeous that listeners find nothing wanting.
Papageno is best loved for two arias: the first solo in which he
announces himself as a bird catcher and the later ecstatic love duet with
his mate, the equally feathery Papagena, during which the pair plan their
future flock of little Papagenos and -genas. Both melodies are light,
bouncy, silly, and enchanting, and along with the Queen of the Night’s
tormented rant, with its famous F above high C, these tunes from
Papageno are the opera’s zenith. Some musicologists have proposed that
in these arias, Mozart is mocking the insipidity of the Viennese musical
establishment. Or maybe they are meant to ridicule the compositions of
Antonio Salieri, the lesser but at the time more socially established and
respected composer. Or perhaps the figure of Papageno represents Salieri
himself, painted as a halfwit. (The portrayal of Salieri in Amadeus is
entertaining but fictitious—he did not poison Mozart.) I have made an
effort to give credence to such theories, but in all honesty, it is difficult to
believe that anyone who knows anything of Mozart and has truly
experienced Die Zauberflöte could come to such conclusions. Within
The Magic Flute, one message rises above all the others: Mozart loves
Papageno. In one of the early performances, he even surprised
Schikaneder by appearing offstage to play the sound of Papageno’s
glockenspiel himself!
 Librettist Emanuel Schikaneder as Papageno. (Engraving by Ignaz Alberti,
1791)

Renowned Seattle Opera director Speight Jenkins (now emeritus)

wrote an essay for the program of a 2011 production of The Magic Flute
titled “Papageno’s Magical Humanity,” in which he claims that Papageno
is the character in this opera with whom the audience can most
immediately connect: “He wants a good life, enough food to eat, and
above all a good wife. Mozart, from what we know of him, had the same
feelings: He loved his wife, Constanze, and perhaps his most obvious
connection in the libretto to his own feeling is Papageno’s wanting
Papagena to be his Herzensweibchen (wife of my heart), which was
Mozart’s pet name for Constanze.” Mr. Jenkins has directed numerous
productions of The Magic Flute and attended countless performances of
the opera all over the world. When I asked him over a cup of tea at a
Seattle coffee shop recently whether Papageno might represent some
kind of derogatory comment by Mozart on the music of his day, Jenkins
laughed. “Papageno is Mozart’s Everyman,” he responded. Then he
paused and looked at me straight before saying, “Papageno is Mozart.”

There are many persistent but untrue myths about Mozart—that he was a
“man-child,” always infantile; that he was broke his whole life; that he
was buried in a pauper’s grave. One of the most enduring is the notion,
so commonly repeated in the Mozart scholarship, that he was the “most
urban of composers,” that he was at home only in the city and altogether
isolated from the natural world in his life and his work. The
misconception may be traceable to a work by Alfred Einstein (no
verifiable relation to Albert), the music historian best known for
completing the first thorough edit of Mozart’s musical catalog (the
Köchel catalog, still in use, which lists the works roughly in order of
completion, thus the K. followed by a number that appears on each of
Mozart’s compositions). In his 1945 book Mozart: His Character, His
Work, Einstein proclaimed that the composer had no sympathy for
nature. The book was read by an elite audience in its time but would
likely be nothing more than an obscure reference today if not for the fact
that Thomas Mann, in the throes of his final illness, chose Einstein’s
volume as his deathbed reading. In a 1955 letter to his son Michael, the
penultimate letter of his life, Mann wrote that he could sit up listening to
music for perhaps an hour a day, but even this effort taxed his nerves. He
would rather read Einstein’s book. He swallowed Einstein whole and
immortalized his untenable ideas with some of the last words that issued
from his own pen:

What especially interests me is that Mozart has no sense for nature

at all, nor for architecture, or Sehenswürdigkeiten in general, but
found stimulation only in music itself, and, so to speak, made
music out of music, a kind of artistic inbreeding and filtered
production—very curious.

The idea that Mozart’s music is somehow sourced in music itself is

philosophically intriguing, and there is no way to know how his genius
unfolded in the mysterious process of composition, for which Wolfgang
possessed an innate facility. But to make the leap from such musing to
the notion that Mozart had “no sense for nature” is simply unsupportable.
Mozart did love the bustle of the city, and he was concerned about the
social matters that came to the fore there—wealth, appearance, and
especially acclaim. But even a cursory reading of Mozart’s letters and
knowledge of his daily activities show that he loved the natural world
and turned to wild things for profound inspiration. Like Goethe, he was
interested in recent scientific discoveries, and he paid attention to
animals, weather, and the workings of the natural world. He accumulated
a small gallery of fine bird prints, part of which was recently gathered for
a temporary display at Mozarthaus, and his collection grew to include
detailed plant drawings. He loved to be out of the city, to picnic with
Constanze in wooded places, to wander at length with her in the Prater,
the tree-lined, bird-filled park at the edge of Vienna. “I just can’t make
up my mind to go back to the city so early,” he wrote to Leopold after a
day out with his “pregnant little wife.” And upon seeing the cottage in
the Vienna woods where he was to be put up for a few days while
visiting the chancellor, he exclaimed to his father, “The little house is not
much, but the surroundings!—the woods—where he had a grotto built
that looks as if it had been done by Nature herself—all of it is so
Magnificent and so agreeable.” Mozart did not conspicuously gush about
his feeling for nature as the Romantics would, but his response was
honest and heartfelt. He loved birds, loved animals, loved to ride his
horse, loved to walk at the edge of the woods. All of this is expressed
with joy in his letters and in his music.
Poet Gary Snyder wrote that wildness is “a quality of one’s own
consciousness,” an elemental characteristic that ran deep in Mozart—he
had a way of being, a habit of imagination that belonged in the realm of
wildness and nature, regardless of where he lived. It is a quality that, at
some level, we all share.

Carmen’s domestic life is a trade-off. She doesn’t have the freedom of a

wild bird, but she doesn’t have the perils of wild life to contend with
either: exposure to extreme weather; the vagaries of food availability;
competition with other starlings; parasites and diseases that social birds
share; predators. And there are other perks to Carmen’s life in our
household. She is fed homegrown arugula by hand and has eggs hard-
boiled just for her. She enjoys in-house cello concerts. She has a laptop
and gets to watch Seinfeld reruns. She has a pet cat.
With all of this I sometimes forget Carmen’s essential wildness, but
then she will do something so completely and weirdly bird-ish that I am
startled into remembering. Her sunbath is one of these things. On sunny
days I grab a book and plunk myself in a chair by the bright kitchen
window for this lazy-but-necessary starling health maintenance. Carmen
perches on my arm or shoulder where the sun’s warmth feels magnified
through the window glass. She settles in, spreads her wings, tilts her
head, opens her beak, and raises every feather on her body, as if she were
a very soft porcupine. Bits of spittle form at the edges of her bill. To all
the world, she would look extravagantly poisoned.
Like many birds, starlings enter a torpor-like state in the sun and
spread themselves out so that as much light as possible can reach their
epidermis. The many health benefits are believed to include vitamin D
absorption, discouraging of parasites, release of oils that protect the skin,
and possibly even a mental-health advantage—something akin to the
restorative calm we humans feel when we lie on the beach or meditate.
Sunning birds look like dying zombies. Their pupils dilate, and they
flop sideways on the ground. I cannot count how many times people
have called me to describe a supposedly sick bird in their yard in just this
pose. I’ve made sure that while Carmen always has some shade in her
aviary, she also has a couple of places that get direct sunlight at certain
times of day so she can sun herself when she wants to and needs to. But
as per usual, she prefers company, and so she would rather sun on my
shoulder or my arm, or on top of my head, just barely balancing on the
tips of her outstretched wings. I marvel at the individual perfection of her
feathers, all lifted one by one in this singular sunning ritual. And though
Carmen sunbathes almost every day, I never stop wondering over the
wild strangeness of it.
Carmen’s water baths take almost as long and are even more trouble
for me. I don’t leave a dish of bathwater in her aviary because her
splashing would make a mess with the bird waste and the newspapers
that line the floor. If I put a bowl in the sink, she will ignore it and stay
on my shoulder—she wants me to hold the bowl for her. Baths are good
for her, so I give in. Every day I hold her favorite turquoise Fiestaware
bowl under the tap and let a thin stream of water fall and collect in the
dish. Carmen jumps in and out several times, hopping from my wrist to
the bowl, ducking her head and fluffing her wings over and over and
splashing water all around the kitchen for as long as ten minutes. If I
don’t wear a raincoat, I have to change my soaking-wet clothes after.
This might be a bit inconvenient some days, but it’s also fun, and
Carmen clearly loves her bath. After she finishes, she leaps to my
shoulder and shakes like a dog, filling my ear with water, then flies
straight to her aviary and is not the tiniest bit interested in coming out
again for at least a couple of hours—she’s busy preening every single
freshly clean feather.*

Zombie sunbath. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

 Joyful water bath. (Photograph by Tom Furtwangler)

When Carmen first feathered out, I thought I might have to teach her
to take baths—to coax her into the water, maybe drizzle water over her
head to inspire the ducking motion I’d seen in wild starlings during their
sidewalk puddle baths. After all, I’d had to teach Claire to trust water
and to wash her own hair when she was a toddler; perhaps young
starlings learned to bathe by watching older starlings. Yet it turns out that
the duck-lift-flap-splash motion is in her blood, and almost the second
Carmen feathered out, she attempted to bathe in my water glass (while I
was trying to drink from it). Like sunning, water baths are entirely
innate. But I was soon to discover proof of an even deeper inborn
wildness.
One day, Carmen was hanging out in her aviary on a branch by the
window. All of a sudden, a Cooper’s hawk perched briefly in the big
camellia tree just outside, then threw himself, feet forward, into
Carmen’s closed window, talons aimed at her breast. Now, many birds
flit at Carmen’s window. There are chickadees, bushtits, house finches,
and hummingbirds. Some of them, like crows, are almost as big as the
Cooper’s hawk. She observes them with a curious eye. Sometimes, she
will hop over for a closer look; sometimes she will hop away and watch
them, wondering, from a distance. This day, when a bird-eating predator
she had never seen in her life came at her window, she let out a shriek I
did not know she was capable of and hurled herself across the room and
onto my shoulder, where she spent the next fifteen minutes panting and
—another behavior I’d never witnessed—shivering. The Cooper’s hawk
banged against the window a couple more times (because he was flying
from the nearby camellia, he was unable to get up much speed and was
not at all injured, but he did appear to be exceedingly put out). He sat
peering in from his perch among the pink flowers for two hours.
Meanwhile, I had this suddenly wild bird on my shoulder who, in her
own mind, had just narrowly escaped death. Here was a feral intelligence
I hadn’t been certain she possessed. But such evolved and wild knowing
runs through blood, heart, and imagination—in birds, in each of us.

When I set out to follow the story of Mozart and his starling, I saw at its
center a shining, irresistible paradox: one of the greatest and most loved
composers in all of history was inspired by a common, despised starling.
Now I muse upon the many facets of this tale, and it is wonderful, yes,
even more wonderful than I had imagined. But looking back at the trail
that I have wandered with these kindred birds—one in history and one in
my home—I see also that, as both humans and birds so often are, I have
been tricked by my attraction to the shiny little object. For in the end, it
is not the exceptionality of this story that is the true wonder. It is its
ordinariness.
In the creatures that intertwine with our lives, those we see daily and
those that watch us from urban and wild places—from between branches
and beneath leaves and under eaves and stairwells and culverts and the
sides of walks and pathways—we share everything. We share breath, and
biology, and blood. We share our needs for food and water and shelter.
We share the imperative to mate and to give new life and to keep our
young safe and warm and fed. We share susceptibility to disease and the
potential to suffer and an inevitable frailty in the face of these things. We
share a certain death. We share everything, constantly, every moment of
every day and night, across eons. And in this shared earthly living, when
we give our attention to it, we find the basis of our compassion, and of
our empathy for other creatures.
And yet we have so much more in common than these of-the-body
needs. We all poop, yes. But we all ponder, too, in a manner that may or
may not be human but is whole and wondrous. We are at every moment
surrounded by consciousness, a feast of unique intelligences. Every
creature has its particular ways and wiles. Each being has its own
presence, voice, silence, song, body, place. We are bound by our
sameness and our uniqueness in equal measure—both spring from our
shared being on a vital, conscious earth. This is a wild communion. And
it is in this recognition that we move beyond simple compassion to a
more certain, more essential sense of relatedness, of kinship.
Mozart felt this, I know. Like me, he was drawn at first to the shiny
thing —in his case it was Star’s singing back to him the song he himself
had written. But in his elegy poem we see that a different relationship
evolved. The bird’s mimicry is not once mentioned. This is a poem to a
kindred creature whose presence brought play, sound, song, joy, and
friendliness to the maestro’s life. And in the work that Star inspired, this
is what we see too. A shared sense of mischief, music, and delight. The
word kinship comes from Old English—of the same kind, and therefore
related. Kindly and kindness also grow from this root—the bearing
toward others that kinship inspires.
I have always thought of all creatures—all organisms, really—as
relations. Whether wandering alone in deep wilderness or just leaning
against a tree growing beside an urban sidewalk, I have had no difficulty
feeling, as if in dreamtime, the roots of our relatedness—ecologically,
yes, but also with an overlay of the sacred, the holy. Starlings, though
pretty, were a rift in this vision. They fluttered outside this wholeness.
But my thinking has evolved. Ecologically, it is true—starlings do not
belong in this country, this city; but relationally, it is not true. We live
together in a tangled complexity. I listen to the starlings mimic back to
me my own profound ecological shortcomings. Carmen is a creature
with a body, voice, and consciousness in the world. In this, we are
sisters. And all these unwelcomed starlings on the grassy parking strip?
Yes, they are my relations too.
The Cartesian belief in an absolute separateness of lives, bodies, and
brains maintains a foothold in the traditions of our modern culture. We
see it in the ways that we are pitted against one another in commerce, in
education, and in the small, daily jealousies of our own minds. We see it
in the ways that we continue to find it culturally acceptable to diminish
animals in agriculture, in entertainment, and in scientific
experimentation. And yet, when we are attentive, we find that we are not
separate, not alone. We are not isolated little minds wandering on a large
and indifferent earth. We are surrounded by our kin, by all of life, beings
with whom we are wayfarers together. Instead of walking upon, we walk
within, and this within-ness brings our imaginations to life. We are
inspired—literally “breathed upon”—together.
Our creativity and our connection to other beings is tangled in a
beautiful etymology. The words creative and creature spring from the
same Latin root, creare, “to produce, to grow, to bring into existence.” It
was Ged, Ursula Le Guin’s beloved young wizard of Earthsea, who
learned after the fall of his individual pride that the wise person is “one
who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have
speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be
learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great
slow gestures of trees.” Through such understanding we arrive at a new
wholeness. We become more receptive and free in body and in
imagination, and our unique potential for creative magnificence is
enlivened. We become the listening artists of our own lives and culture.
And though, as Mozart learned with Star and I learned with Carmen,
it is natural to come into attentive communion through the individual
creatures before us—this bird, this raccoon, this tree (for we are learning
that trees have their own systems of communication and knowing)—
these individuals are not ends in themselves but a kind of window onto
the totality of existence. I waited so eagerly for Carmen to mimic back
the concerto’s motif. Now I see that she has been calling out something
much bigger, much more vital; she has been singing back the song of
life, all of life, all the time.
 Nine

MOZART’S EAR AND THE MUSIC OF THE

SPHERES

In a dusty corner of Mozart’s birth-house museum in Salzburg, there is a

small room with lesser ephemera tucked into glass cases and tacked onto
walls: cards and concert notes and silhouette portraits of distant relatives.
I was there on a sunny day, and the rooms were dark. I’d been at the
museum for hours, seen all I thought I wanted to see, and was feeling
tempted to rush outside into the light and visit the aproned chestnut
vendor I’d passed by the front step on my way in. But I reminded myself
that I’d come all this way to contemplate such bits and bobs, so I sighed
and stepped through the door frame. Nothing much caught my eye until I
spotted a little lithograph, not much bigger than a postcard, at chest
height near the door leading out of the room. On it, there were two
penciled ears. The one on the right was labeled Gewöhnliches Ohr
(“normal ear”). The one on the left was labeled Mozart’s Ohr.
This sketch had been printed in the biography of Mozart by Georg
Nikolaus von Nissen, Constanze’s second husband, with the comment
“The construction of Mozart’s ears was completely different from the
norm” and the claim that Wolfgang and Constanze’s son Franz had
inherited this rare ear shape. At first, both ears pictured looked normal to
me, so I began to surreptitiously inspect the ears of other Mozart
pilgrims in the room to get a better sense of what most ears really look
like. Sure enough, the Mozart ear had at least two distinctions. The large,
curved, upper part of the ear, called the antihelix (as I learned in my later
research of outer ear anatomy), is broad, flat, and rather squared, and the
small flap in front of the ear canal, called the tragus, is greatly reduced.
It is difficult to find portraits of Mozart to corroborate Nissen’s claim;
in most paintings, his hair is covering his ears. But a portrait of Franz
and brother Carl as young boys (the only two Mozart children to survive
beyond infancy) does seem to show a reduced tragus on Franz (his upper
ear is not visible), and the book by Nissen was overseen by Constanze,
who would have known more than anyone living about Mozart’s ears.
She insisted that certain things be whitewashed in the biography, but
there would have been no reason to misinform readers about an ear; the
sketch is likely credible.* It is probable that the strangeness of Mozart’s
ears caused him some embarrassment—maybe they are always covered
in portraits because he wanted to hide them. This auricular
nonconformity remains rare today, but it is not unheard of and is
colloquially called “Mozart ear” by specialists.

A sketch of Mozart’s ear (left) and a normal ear.

What might it mean for a composer, of all people, to have an oddly

shaped ear? A person like Mozart, whose life was dedicated to creation
via sound? When I got home from Austria I talked with ear doctors and
audiologists, and though everyone I spoke to emphasized that they were
speculating, there was a general consensus. A fully formed tragus helps
distinguish sounds that come from both the front and the rear. Sounds
that originate in front of a person can sometimes be overwhelming to the
inner ear, and it is believed the tragus provides a small barrier that subtly
filters such sounds. Sounds that come from behind, by contrast, are
already dampened by the ear pinna, so the tragus has an opposite
function—it serves as a funnel that collects sound and bounces it into the
inner ear. For someone with a small or nonexistent tragus, sounds
coming from the front might be louder, fuller, more nuanced, or more
distinct. Sounds from behind, however, might be dissipated or
diminished, making it difficult for the listener to tell where they came
from.
The impact of all this on Mozart as a composer is a matter of
conjecture, but it does seem likely, at the very least, that Mozart
experienced sound somewhat differently than most of us. It is impossible
to say whether such an altered listening influenced his compositions, but
it would certainly have led to an uncommon immersion in the aural
dimension of life. I wonder how Mozart tilted his head to calm the sound
before him, discern the sound from behind, or balance his heightened
sense of the difference between the two. I think of Carmen’s sweet turn
of head—the way she lifts her strange bird ear whenever I call her name
or when she is listening attentively to music or, really, to anything. Star
did this too, as starlings do.
One morning early this spring I was walking in the wooded park near
my home. The migratory flycatchers, tanagers, thrushes, and warblers
were just beginning to arrive, thin from their long flights—all the way
from Mexico, Central America, South America. I’d left my binoculars at
home that day, intent on walking unencumbered and letting my other,
nonvisual senses get in shape for the onslaught of growth and movement
and birdsong that the season would bring. I heard a little chip in an aspen
and stopped to listen. There I was startled by a young man who passed,
paused, and looked back at me. “I like the way you tilt your head,” he
told me, and walked on. The oddest compliment I’d ever received, but I
liked it. Yes, I thought, this is just the attitude I want to cultivate. The tilt
of the head, the listening for something just beyond normal hearing.
Birdsong is the perfect invitation to such listening. Eleanor Ratcliffe
at the University of Surrey is engaged in a years-long study to determine
the effects of birdsong on listeners. She is learning that human reactions
to birdsongs are as varied as the songs themselves. Most of us are
unsettled by raucous vocalizations, like those of a crow chasing a
predator from its nest. But when we hear the cooing of pigeons, or the
spring song of robins, or even just the background chatter of yard birds?
Ratcliffe’s study and those of others show that most people respond with
decreased stress, increased calm, better concentration, brightened mood,
and heightened creativity. Some find it easier to access meditative states
while listening to birdsong.
All these responses are analogous to the way certain musical
compositions lift and change our mood and increase our receptivity to
the world around us. Both music and birdsong flit past our tympanic
membranes, connect with our brains, brighten our minds, and transport
our spirits. More than other ambient environmental sound, birdsong
speaks in the musical language of pitch, rhythm, lilt, and repetition. But
is it right to call birdsong music? By way of metaphor, there can be no
argument. It is humans who chose the word song for the seasonal
vocalizations of passerine birds, a word that is used in even the most
academic of ornithological texts. But if we want to transcend metaphor
and suggest that birdsong is music in the same way that human
composition is music, then we are wandering into a scholarly fray that
most of us did not know existed.

Birdsong carried through nearly every habitat on earth for millions of

years before primates appeared, and so human evolution occurred against
a backdrop of avian music. Cultures across all continents and times long
before and after Mozart developed music that was inspired by and based
on the sounds made by local birds. Over the decades, naturalists,
ornithologists, musicologists, philosophers, and poets have found
parallels and counterparts between the two. Scales, ornaments, trills,
inversions, themes, variations. Not every passerine bird that sings uses
all these attributes of human music, but all of them can be found in the
combined repertoire of the world’s songbirds. Darwin noted the
resemblance of birdsong to musical composition and believed that birds
possess an aesthetic sense. The well-known ornithologist Luis Baptista,
in his paper “Why Birdsong Is Sometimes Like Music,” writes, “Some
birdsong is pitched to the same scale as Western music, which is one
possible reason for human attraction to these sounds.” Other prominent
ornithologists note that white-crowned sparrows sing a perfect fourth
interval between their first and second notes; that the canyon wren, with
its gorgeous cascading series of notes that bounce against the desert
stone walls, sings in the chromatic scale of twelve pitches per octave;
that the wood thrush’s layered song is pitched to the Western scale. The
list could go on for pages.
One of the most intriguing comparisons of human music and birdsong
was penned by the philosopher Charles Hartshorne, student of process
theologian Alfred North Whitehead. Like Whitehead, Hartshorne saw the
divine in the unfolding of earthly creation, in which humans participate.
He was a gifted and committed amateur ornithologist, and he spent
nearly an entire century—almost the whole of his 103-year life—
immersed in the study of birdsong, research that culminated in his 1973
opus Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Birdsong. It’s
an unusual book that combines scientific observation and quantification
with the language of poetry, philosophy, and possibility. In his life of
listening, Hartshorne located nearly every element of human musical
composition in the songs of birds. Accelerando, ritardando, crescendo,
diminuendo. Structure, rhythmic variation, melody, verse. The essential
difference between avian and human music, suggested Hartshorne, is
temporality, with the repeatable patterns in birdsong having an upper
limit of about fifteen seconds (he evidently did not record starlings).
In spite of his well-documented examples and a book that is a wonder
to read, Hartshorne has been criticized for being too expansive and
speculative—too philosophical for the topic to hand, which some felt
ought to remain securely in the scientific citadel. A recent paper
published in Animal Behaviour seeks to set the record straight. For his
paper “Is Birdsong Music? Evaluating Harmonic Intervals in Songs of a
Neotropical Songbird,” Marcelo Araya-Salas, a PhD candidate in the
animal behavior lab at New Mexico State University, studied the voice of
the tiny nightingale wren, Microcerculus philomela, chosen for its
complex, musical-sounding song. The bird is just a little bit bigger than a
mouse, brown all over, with delicate curved black-and-cream speckling
on its breast. Its eyes are huge and black. When it throws its head back to
sing, it almost seems to shape-shift—the song is so startling, loud, and
beautiful that the bird appears to become twice as large as it really is.
When the song is finished, there again is just the avian mouse in place of
the giant singing wren.
 Araya-Salas gathered recordings of the nightingale wren from its
entire range across Central and South America and analyzed songs from
eighty-one individual birds alongside the well-known chromatic, major
diatonic, and major pentatonic scales. These scales, he argues, are the
ones that “represent the most intuitive pattern in which birds might base
their songs.” As a starting point for evaluation, he held up the “harmonic
birdsong hypothesis,” the notion that if birdsong was music, then
consecutive notes in a bird’s song should be closer to the harmonic
intervals in these common scales than we would expect from chance. He
evaluated 243 of his recordings alongside the musical scales to determine
whether the wren songs conformed to harmonic intervals and determined
that, in all of these comparisons, there were only six instances of wrens
singing harmonic intervals, or about 2 percent—just what we would
expect from chance, certainly not more. Araya-Salas argues, “If the
frequencies are not determined by harmonic intervals in this species, it
seems less likely that it happens in other birds with more complex song
elements.” He concludes that those who suggest a closer parallel
between music and birdsong are simply misguided. “Documented
musical properties in birds might be caused by cultural biases of the
listener or misunderstanding of the physics of musical compositions.”
Araya-Salas’s conclusion gave me pause. Documented musical
properties in birds might be caused by cultural biases of the listener or
misunderstanding of the physics of musical compositions. In other
words: If you think birdsong is music, it is your own sad little
misunderstanding. The study is an interesting one with much food for
thought, but the conclusions drastically overreach. The paper tells us that
the song of one passerine species does not display harmonicity. That’s
one bird out of about four thousand species, each with a unique song.
And the measure was just a tiny sample of Western musical scales—
there are many other scales and harmonic forms people consider music,
both in the West and across the globe. And the conclusion that this
particular bird’s song is not strictly analogous to a few particular Western
musical scales? Well, we already knew that. But does that mean it’s not
music in some form or that it is not musical?*
David Rothenberg is an academic philosopher, a musician, and a studied
amateur ornithologist. In his wonderful book Why Birds Sing, he
cautions us against failing to distinguish between what birdsong is for
and what birdsong is. We know the ornithological explanations for the
function of birdsong: the creation and defense of a territory, the
declaration of sexual maturity, the attracting and securing of a mate. This
is what birdsong is for. But as for what birdsong is? “Music,”
Rothenberg declares. In my college-level ornithology text, authors Joel
Welty and Luis Baptista listed the usual reproductive, social, and
individual functions of birdsong but added that they could not rule out
the possibility that birds sing “from a sense of well-being” or simply “for
the joy of it.” And it was the philosopher Charles Hartshorne who added
to the list of ornithological functions of birdsong “bliss.”
The longer I ponder, the more I come to realize that the question of
whether birdsong is strictly music, while a good question, is not my
question. Determining a clear statement of the proper relationship
between birdsong and music might have value for scientists and
musicologists; in a strict academic setting bound by lexiconic definitions
of words like music and harmony, the discussion gains a kind of interest
and worth. This way of knowing has inherent beauty, and I do not mean
to disparage it. But in this moment? With a Mozart quartet playing softly
on the stereo as I write, and a tiny, round orange-crowned warbler in the
tree outside my study window lending his trill to the top of the allegro
movement? I close my eyes and hear them both entering my ears, and I
cannot tease them completely apart. It would feel frugal and tightfisted to
suggest that one is music and the other is not. And in such matters, I do
not want to feel tightfisted. I want to feel profligate.

It is another day at the forested park near my home, and well into the
summer. I am sitting in the grass, leaning against the thick trunk of a
Douglas fir, and staring up into the branches of a thick and knotted old
bigleaf maple. My mossy seat is not in a well-kept or frequently trodden
area of the park. I was drawn by the raucous cawing of two juvenile
ravens and wandered over for a look. Ravens are not common here, and
this is the first time in some years that they have successfully nested in
the park. Three young hatched, but one of these was killed while it was
still floppy and small, most likely by an off-leash dog.
I am being eaten alive by biting flies, but I stay where I am because
one of the young birds has flown from the tangled woods and into the
tree right next to me, from where she calls to her sibling. Craaaww,
craaawww! So loud! This young bird is perfecting the scream with an
underlying low croak that characterizes the vocalizations of her species,
already distinguishable from any other bird. But in spite of the ruckus
she is making, the little raven appears calm. Quiet in spirit, loud in voice.
She looks down at me, unfazed, as naive young birds are. She fluffs her
wings, calls again. It is good to be in her company. In my notebook, I
sketch the tree, sketch the bird. I squint at my drawing, and even then it
is not good. I close my eyes and listen.
Crow. Red-breasted nuthatch. The chirring of starlings in a nearby
nest, the tapping of a downy woodpecker. Robins. The spiral song of the
Swainson’s thrush. Human children. Traffic. A motorcycle. The low of a
ferry coming in to dock. Bushtits, chickadees. Olive-sided flycatcher. A
bird whose voice I do not know (which makes me vaguely
uncomfortable). A rustle on the ground in the tangle of ferns and
huckleberry and nootka rose. A mouse? A Pacific wren? At this
urban/woodland park it is just as likely to be a rat. A woman calls to her
child, “Gaabbbyyyy!”—the only sound louder than the ravens. Spotted
towhee. More crows, mad ones (they don’t like the ravens, but there may
also be a sharp-shinned hawk nearby). I keep my eyes closed as all the
sounds soften, yet heighten and blend. I visualize them surrounding me, a
map-blanket of resonance all around me. But now there is a scritch right
next to my ear, so startling that I cheat and peek. A brown creeper
hanging on the tree bark! I can hardly keep calm. The creeper pays me
no mind in my stillness and the tiny scrape of creeper toenail in my ears
is as loud as a truck. I want to squeal, but I close my eyes back down,
farther down. I calm my excited creeper nerves. There is my breathing
and, can I hear it? Yes, there is my heartbeat.
When I finally open my eyes, I am Rip Van Winkle, unsure of how
much time has passed. All the sound is still here, still everywhere. And
the raven is still above me. “Hi,” I whisper. But her eyes, now, are lightly
closed. Perhaps she too hears her own heartbeat, faster than mine. Surely
she does. But here is her sibling raven flapping in the branches. Clumsy
and new, he flies to another tree, perhaps a hundred yards away, and
craawws loudly. This is too far; the siblings want to be close. My raven
looks up, shakes off her own young silence, screams, and flies in the
direction of her brother. There is a movement of grass, of bodies. The
sounds continue, all of them and more. They rise, fall, become almost
silent, rise again. “Is this it?” I wonder out loud—why not? The rest of
the earth seems to be wondering aloud. Am I wrong to think that this is
the music of the spheres?*
When we use this phrase colloquially, we refer to a poetic sensibility
or a philosophic notion. To “hear the music of the spheres” is to feel in
harmony with life, with self. We have seen something of incomparable
beauty or achieved a state of bliss through meditation or yoga or
mountain climbing. We find ourselves ridiculously alive after a horrific
accident, or we have fallen suddenly in love. Somehow, the world itself
is singing to us, and we are listening in a rarefied way.

Our ancestors were more attuned to the movements of the heavens than
most of us are today. This was partly because the night skies were more
visible due to the absence of bright lights, but people who depended on
gathering, hunting, and small-scale farming for survival also relied on
the movements of the stars to locate themselves in time, in seasons, in
the cycles of planting and harvesting. In Egypt, the appearance of
shining Sirius presaged the annual flooding of the Nile. The regular
movements of the stars above were reassuring and gave some sense of
rhythm and predictability in a time that was plagued by a harsh
awareness of the ephemerality of life. Against the predictability of the
stars, though, lay the discomfiting wandering of the planets (the word
itself is from the Greek planetes, “wanderers”). If the stars had meaning
in relation to earthly cycles and events, as they clearly did, then the
planets must have messages as well. But these messages were
incomprehensible, impossible to read (when an elite priesthood claimed
that they could decipher the messages of the planets, they became the
first astrologers). Humans’ pursuit of meaning in the planets likely began
two hundred thousand years ago or more.
 We can only wonder over the speculations of the early sky watchers.
But by the time Pythagoras was born, in 570 BC, on the Greek island of
Samos, there was in place a strong human desire to find a fundamental
regularity to the bafflingly complex planetary movements. Pythagoras
himself is a shadowy figure, a kind of cipher about whom little is known,
and yet somehow the history of geometry has come to be written on his
thin biography. It is possible that even his eponymous theorem might
have been outlined centuries earlier by mathematicians in Egypt, India,
or Babylonia. But we do know with certainty that Pythagoras and his
followers sought links between numbers, geometry, and the structure of
the natural world, believing that all of these were interconnected and that
the connections themselves had not just mathematical but also ethical
and spiritual significance.
In their search for mathematical and earthly harmony, the
Pythagoreans explored music and musical instruments. They recognized
that when you pluck two strings, one twice the length of the other, a
perfect octave is produced. Exploring further, they found that strings
with a length ratio of two to three produce an interval called a fifth,
which is pleasing to the human ear; Western music was largely
developed around such intervals (the violin has four strings, each a fifth
apart). Though the Pythagoreans did not possess the mathematics or the
astronomical knowledge to posit anything but the vaguest of theories,
their melodic explorations led them to propose a “music of the spheres,”
a harmonious relationship that linked the planets one to another in just
the way strings arranged on a violin produce notes that vibrate in
harmony.
The idea of a universal harmony founded in sound is not unique to
Western mathematics. In Hinduism there is the notion of shabad, which
is sometimes interpreted as an audible life stream. Humans can enter this
current through the chanting of the universal syllable om, which activates
the energy centers in the human body and promotes physical and
spiritual resonance with the wider universe. And in the Gospel according
to John, 1:1, it is written, “In the beginning was the Word,” which many
scholars claim would be more accurately translated as “In the beginning
was the Sound.” Not a primordial soup, but a primordial hum.
Two thousand years after Pythagoras, the German mathematician
Johannes Kepler, an advocate of Copernicus’s new heliocentric theories,
followed up on the notion. Kepler sought to understand the sacred
architecture of the solar system and to find mathematical harmony in the
way that planets are placed in space. After a series of misguided
propositions, Kepler eventually became the first known mathematician to
accurately describe planetary orbits. He formulated the principle now
referred to as Kepler’s first law of planetary motion, which states that
orbits are not circular, as was initially presumed, but elliptical; and later
his second law, which established that the spread of the ellipse increases
the farther a planet is from the sun. With these laws, Kepler gave us a
roundabout pathway back to Pythagoras and a planetary orchestra.
Pythagoras based his inquiries into harmony on musical notes, but as
any string player knows, no note that is actually performed is
mathematically pure—every note played on an instrument is influenced
by other notes, the subtle vibrations of the other strings, and even nearby
instruments (when my daughter plays a D on her cello, the D string on
my violin a few feet away hums, even though no one is touching it).
These are musical overtones, and they create the complexity we look for
in a good musical instrument. Geophysicist David Waltham elucidates
this concept in his book Lucky Planet. The overtones, he stresses, are
what make instruments unique. If a pure sound were possible, then all
instruments would sound very much alike, and the orchestra pit would be
dull indeed. Instead, overtones allow for the unique sounds of a violin
versus a piano versus a French horn, creating a world of interaction
between material substance, space, and sound.
The simplification might torture a cosmologist, but there is an
analogy in the movement of the planets. The orbit of each planet in our
solar system has a characteristic wobbling, a tilt that, as it oscillates,
interacts with the oscillations of the other planets’ tilted, slightly wobbly,
ever so slowly changing orbits. The resulting vibrations are the planetary
overtones, and when they mingle, they create a complex hum, the
background music of our universe, our planet, our lives. Simple,
perfectly parallel spherical orbits would not allow the friction that could
create such a sound, so Kepler really was on the path that led to our
modern understanding of the music of the spheres.
This planetary hum is fifty octaves below the hearing range of
humans, but scientists have modeled the orbital oscillations and raised
the frequency to human range that they can play back for us. The sound
is a kind of chaotic scream that, as it goes on, lowers in pitch and
increases in volume, as would be expected of expanding elliptical orbits.
(Waltham again suggests musical instruments by way of analogy: A cello
is lower and louder than a violin of the same shape.) The sound, writes
Waltham, must be more like the familiar chaos of an orchestra tuning up
—not wholly unpleasant, but still discordant and unpredictable—than of
the orchestra coming together to perform a concerto. More like a gull, he
says, than a nightingale. Or perhaps, I cannot help thinking, like the
whistle of a starling.
And overlaid upon this music of the spheres, this present-but-
unhearable starling-esque hum? There is the music that we hear, and
make, daily. There is the music of Bach, of Messiaen, of Mozart. Of the
woodland wren, the woodpecker’s drum. The laughter of an infant, the
drag of an old woman’s cane against the sidewalk. David Rothenberg
wrote: “Species are supposed to sing only for their own kind, but the
more I listen, the less I’m sure. Yesterday I heard all the thrushes singing
together in the laurel woods: veeries, hermits, wood thrushes. They all
seemed to be getting at one total song.” I recognize this as the song from
my woodland meditation. Human and natural music both make mischief
with our ingrained patterns of separateness.

Years ago, I heard the late Zen Buddhist teacher Robert Aitken give a
reading at Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle’s famed indie shop. After,
those who had gathered for the talk walked out the doors and into a
warm late-summer evening. Aitken Roshi had ended with a short
meditation; our minds were hushed and open. It seemed sudden when
someone pointed and called out, “Look at the birds!” There in the urban
sky was a cloud of starlings, thousands of starlings, swirling in one of
their great, mesmerizing orbs. “It’s a sign,” someone whispered.
And it was a sign. Autumn was coming. In the spring and summer,
starlings divide into couples and then family groups in the business of
mating and nesting. But in the late summer, this exclusivity breaks down,
and starlings begin to gather into the groups that will grow into their
huge fall and winter flocks. Flocking has many benefits—through force
of numbers, birds find and share food, roosts, and warmth, and, in flight,
they foil aerial predators. When a hawk sees a solitary bird, it can focus
on that bird as prey with efficient single-mindedness. But a flock
becomes an organism in itself, making it difficult for a predator to zero
in on an individual bird.
Starlings seem to take the evolutionary mechanism of flocking into
the realm of high art when they gather in hundreds, thousands,
sometimes even a million birds and turn about the sky in mysterious,
graceful, spellbinding dance-clouds called murmurations. These are
evasive maneuvers, complicated enough to beguile even a peregrine
falcon, the most formidable of aerial predators. But they bewitch the
human mind as well. As we watch them converge into great spheres,
then swirl into funnels and ellipses, starling murmurations lift us into an
elated, almost hypnotic state.

Murmuration. (Photograph by Donald Macauley)

Some ornithologists claim that starling flocks were originally named

murmurations because of the varied songs and sounds that starlings
create. But starlings do not call out much during their flock-dances, and I
am more inclined to agree with other avian etymologists who believe
that the name comes from the whisper of wings, so many wings, together
in flight. Beneath a murmuration, I feel that I am kneeling in an ancient
cathedral that ought to be silent but instead whispers overhead with the
gathered prayers of hundreds of years of pilgrims. But here is a much
greater cathedral—the entire sky—and the prayers are the light brushings
of feathers.
For centuries, humans have looked up at these murmuring flock-
prayers and asked, “How?” How do they spin and change and rise and
gather and spread, all of them, at exactly the same time? With so many
birds in the air, it is imperative that everyone keeps going the same
direction—if even a single bird goes its own way, there will be aerial
crashes and broken wings. Yet there has never been a satisfactory
explanation for the phenomenon. Perhaps there was a lead bird that all of
the rest watched and followed? But sometimes the flocks spread the
length of several city blocks—there was no way that the bird at one end
could see the bird at the other. Maybe the leader gave a vocal signal,
unhearable to us on the ground? Maybe they were involved in a Rupert
Sheldrake-ian group mind, a kind of morphic resonance? Maybe so. The
explanation for such preternatural coordination seemed to transcend
traditional biology. And now that the technology has caught up enough
to give researchers the ability to look carefully at murmurations through
high-powered video, high-resolution slow motion, and computational
modeling, this seems to be true—starling flocks do fly beyond the
parameters of biology and into the realm of cutting-edge physics.
In 2010, University of Rome theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi
published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences. Parisi and his team found that starling murmurations function
in the same way as various natural systems on the cusp of a shift,
described by scientists as “critical transitions.” These are systems that
are poised to tip into a sheer transformation, like metals becoming
magnetized, liquids turning to gas, or gathered snow in the moment
before an avalanche. In such transitional moments, the movement or
velocity of one particle affects all the others, no matter how many others
there are, in what is called a “scale-free correlation.” In terms of starling
murmurations, the change in velocity or movement of one starling would
affect all the rest, whether there were fifty others, or fifty thousand. But
if every bird is busy paying attention to all the others, how does one
individual launch a change in the whole? And how does that whole
respond so quickly?
The answers remain murky, but a couple of years after their initial
paper, Parisi’s team took their research further, paying attention to the
correlation of each individual to the birds closest to it. It turns out that
the change in the movement of one bird will affect the seven birds
closest to it. Those seven birds will each affect seven more birds, and
their movements will ripple, scaling rapidly, through the flock. How it
happens so incredibly fast is still a mystery and the subject of ongoing
research, but it is postulated that these moments of transition in starling
movements may mirror universal principles at work in the proteins and
neurons that underlie the makeup and movement of all creatures. Thus,
starling murmurations might be the most visible and also the most
winsome iteration of biophysical criticality, a mirror into deeper, unseen,
all-embracing secrets of life that have yet to be understood. Watching
them, I feel that mystery viscerally; I feel my head swirl and my body
sway. I always thought this was because the movements of murmurations
are so graceful, and surely that is part of it. But it may also arise from an
unconscious identification with the same movements at work within the
neurons of my own brain and neural synapses. Deep calling unto deep, as
the psalmist sang.

The late Welsh poet John O’Donohue spoke of the earthen wisdom
possessed by our animal brothers and sisters. “The animals are more
ancient than us,” he urges. “They enjoy a seamless presence—a lyrical
unity with the earth. Animals live outside in the wind, in the waters, in
the mountains, and in the clay. The knowing of the earth is in them.”
And by our attunement, by the tilt of our heads, our enlarged listening,
we enter this knowing in a state of shared awareness and being that
O’Donohue refers to as “interflow.”
It is from this beautiful, feral place that we are able to respond to the
breath of inspiration that summons us to the fullness of our creativity.
Full, because we are cognizant that we are not a lone pair of hands or
eyes or a single voice, that we do not create in isolation but bring our
gift, the art of our lives, to one another, to the earth. We each touch the
seven starlings closest to us in our own murmuration, and the ripple
spreads faster than we could have imagined. We create from what
Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the Rio Abajo Rio, the “river beneath the
river.” The song just beneath our typical hearing, the murmuration that
calls the tiniest neurons of our brains into flight.
And what is this wild summons? What art is asked of us? The gift
offered is different for each but all are equal in grandeur. To paint, draw,
dance, compose. To write songs, poems, letters, diaries, prayers. To set a
violet on the sill; stitch a quilt; bake bread; plant marigolds, beans, apple
trees. To follow the track of the forest elk, the neighborhood coyote, the
cupboard mouse. To open the windows, air the beds, sweep clean the
corners. To hold the child’s hand, listen to the vagrant’s story, paint the
elder friend’s fingernails a delightful shade of pink while wrapped in a
blanket she knit with the deft young fingers of her past. To wander paths,
nibble purslane, notice spiders. To be rained upon. To listen with
changed ears and sing back what we hear.
 Finale

THREE FUNERALS AND A FLIGHT OF

FANCY

While writing this book, I felt constantly superstitious about Carmen’s

well-being. Whenever an animal has a book written about it, that animal
ends up dead. Dewey the Library Cat. Marley the dog. Wesley the owl.
Mumble, the owl who liked sitting on Caesar. Mij, the otter in Ring of
Bright Water. There was a sweet little book penned in the 1980s called
Arnie the Darling Starling; Arnie succumbed to a foot infection in the
last chapter. Writing about an animal seems to be the very kiss of death. I
worried throughout the project that this chapter would end up being titled
“Four Funerals.”
Carmen did everything she could to assist in the fulfilling of this grim
prophecy. I’ve listed many of the common ways for household starlings
to die; Carmen constantly thinks up new ones. It seems she tries to find a
way to kill herself every single day. Besides getting herself locked in the
refrigerator, her many attempts have included:

—Flying headlong into a closed window, after which she lay

motionless on the floor for fifteen minutes while I knelt next to her
whispering, “You’re going to be okay, little one.”
—Ingesting a rubber band that I had to eke out of her esophagus with
surgical delicacy so it wouldn’t become tangled in her intestines.
—Attempting to peck at the nose of Delilah the cat, whom we forgot
to lock up before letting Carmen out of the aviary.
 —Climbing into a narrow cellophane bag that she found who knows
where, getting her wings pinned, and thrashing helplessly about
until discovered, by which time she was gasping for air and the
bag was filled with the fog of her breath.
—Trying to eat something too big to swallow, then almost choking on
it; a raisin, an almond, a garbanzo bean, a snap pea. And, once, a
whole grape.

Carmen’s Near-Death Magnum Opus was flying through an open

window. Of course we are normally religious about closing all the
windows when Carmen is flying loose in the house. But this was a sunny
day; Tom was home alone, listening to Bob Marley and dancing joyfully
around the kitchen. He forgot all about the open window above the stove,
and when he let Carmen out to join him, she flew straight through it and
into the backyard. Tom ran out the door just in time to see her wing
around the house and, it seemed, into the open world. He wandered the
streets, calling her most familiar words—“Hi, Carmen! C’mere!” But
nothing, nothing, nothing. By the time I arrived home, an hour later, Tom
was in a panic, huddled in the backyard with his head in his hands. “I
lost Carmen,” he told me, near tears. Meanwhile, a gaggle of teenage
girls was arriving to meet Claire for a pre-high-school-dance beautifying
party. Then the pizza guy showed up and wanted money. All was utter
mayhem.
The prognosis for starlings who have been raised indoors and escape
into the world is not optimistic. They are not experienced at feeding
themselves; they don’t know how to behave in starling society, and so do
not have the protection of a flock; they think cats are their friends. Lost
starlings have not learned the geography of their neighborhoods as they
would had they been raised among flying outdoor birds, so if they go
exploring, they cannot find their way home, even if they want to. I
learned on the website Starling Talk that some lost starlings have been
recovered after they tamely approach nice people who realize they must
be pets and put up FOUND BIRD signs, but this seemed a long shot. I was
certain that Carmen was lost forever.
After searching and calling all over the neighborhood for a couple of
hours, I finally heard a loud starling contact call from the very top of the
thirty-foot cypress in front of our house. Starlings regularly use this high-
pitched chirp to stay in touch with their flock or with their young. I
didn’t know if Carmen knew how to make this vocalization, and I
couldn’t see the bird that the call was coming from, so very high in the
tree. But I hoped. We borrowed a tall ladder from our neighbor and
placed it against the side of the house, close to the cypress. Tom climbed
up and up, thinking that if the bird we were hearing was in fact Carmen,
she would see him. “Hi, Carmen!” he kept calling. Great, I thought,
fretting. Now I had to worry that I would never see Carmen again and
that my husband would plunge to his death from the top of a precarious
two-story-high ladder. But the bird in the tree began to make its way
down, branch by branch. “Carmen!” I called. It was her. As soon as she
saw Tom, she flew to his shoulder and clung breathlessly to his T-shirt.
She was as happy to be back as we were to have her.
As I dot the i’s on this manuscript, Carmen almost miraculously
continues to flourish. Maybe starlings really do have nine thousand lives.
But in this story, there are still three funerals to tend to.

All three funerals—father, son, and starling—have been widely

misunderstood in the Mozart mythology. Leopold’s came first. In the
spring of 1787, Wolfgang heard from Leopold that he was very ill.
Leopold was a hypochondriac, over-inclined to seek sympathy, and
Wolfgang knew this, but his was a ruminating heart, and he would still
have worried endlessly. Then a new letter: Leopold was much improved!
Then word from a friend: Leopold was ill indeed, perhaps mortally. Poor
Wolfgang! He was not prepared to lose his father. But in this moment, he
gathered his strength and his quill and composed one of the most famous
letters in the Mozart epistolary canon. The letter began roundaboutly but
typically for a missive between Wolfgang and Leopold. Mozart called up
the unique intimacy between father and son as he wrote about the world
of current music and, within it, one of their favorite subjects—others’
declining talents. This, he whispered to Leopold, is “just between you
and me.”

Ramm and the 2 Fischers—that is, the bass singer and the oboist
from London—were here during the Lenten Season; if the latter
 did not play any better when we heard him in Holland than he is
playing now, he certainly does not deserve the reputation he has.
… To put it in one word, he is playing like a Miserable student.…
Well, it’s the Truth—

Eventually, Wolfgang was ready to come around to his worries.

This very moment I have received some news that distresses me

very much—this all the more as I gathered from your last letter
that you were, thank God, doing very well;—but now I hear that
you are really ill! I need not tell you how much I am longing to
hear some reassuring news from you yourself; and, indeed, I
confidently expect such news—although I have made it a habit to
imagine the worst in all situations.

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Mozart’s distress, and the

self-knowledge revealed in the last sentence is as touching as it is true.
He never recovered from the death of his mother, never lived down his
self-blame, never for an instant ceased to worry about Constanze and all
his loved ones. Wolfgang himself was ill at the time with acute kidney
problems. But in this moment, instead of further fretting, he penned a
short meditation to Leopold, a kind of philosophy of death and dying. It
was a message of consolation, meant equally, as I read it, for father and
son.

Death, if we think about it soberly, is the true and ultimate

purpose of our life. I have over the last several years formed such
a knowing relationship with this true and best friend of humankind
that his image holds nothing terrifying for me anymore; instead it
holds much that is soothing and consoling! And I thank my god
that he has blessed me with the insight, you know what I mean,
which makes it possible for me to perceive death as the key to our
ultimate happiness.—I never lie down at night without thinking
that perhaps, as young as I am, I will not live to see another day—
and yet no one who knows me can say that I am morose or
dejected in company—and for this blessing I thank my Creator
every day and sincerely wish the same blessing for All my fellow
 human beings.*

Mozart expressed himself honestly, and his sentiments surely served

as a quiet gesture of both penitence and forgiveness between father and
son. It is a beautiful letter. The passage is often quoted as an expression
of Mozart’s feelings toward death and a suggestion that his own passing,
just four years later, was, if not actually welcomed, at least met with
equanimity. It is read as an overlay to the more sublime moments of the
Requiem. But I think it is important to remember that this is the
expression of a twenty-nine-year-old emotionally distraught musical
genius who is about to find himself parentless. In my reading, this
passage is a cry to God from a son outwardly expressing calm while
inwardly on his knees, rending his garments. On Mozart’s desk was the
draft of Don Giovanni, with its flawed Everyman whom no critic has
ever been able to fully condemn, redeemed as he is, at least on some
level, by the harmony of Mozart’s arias. The don is about to be claimed
by the flames of hell. Mozart was more conflicted than the lines of this
letter would indicate, yes, and yet surely he repeated the sentiments to
himself as, awaiting more news of his father, he lay down before a fitful
sleep. Death: soothing, consoling. This was the last known letter from
Mozart to his father.
Leopold died on May 28, 1787. He was sixty-eight years old, a good
age for the time. It is generally accepted that Mozart’s failure to attend
Leopold’s funeral in Salzburg was a protest, conscious or not, against the
passive-aggressive authority and control that Leopold wielded over
Mozart for the whole of his life. The psychology of the relationship was
certainly complex and damaging, but Mozart never outgrew a feeling of
honest devotion to his father—a mixed sense of love, guilt, and
unfulfilled obligation that would plague him until his own death. It is
surely true that Wolfgang could not face the death of his father straight
on. But at the time Leopold died, Constanze was immobilized with a
septic leg, there were young children in the house, and the couple was
deeply in debt. Mozart could not leave his wife, could not afford the
travel, could not face the expectation, once in Salzburg, of laying out
cash for mourners and services. He did not protest the funeral; he simply
could not go.
Star died just two months after Leopold. I’ve discussed that, as a tribute
to his starling, Mozart arranged a formal funeral, invited friends as
formal mourners, and performed a dramatic reading of the elegy he had
composed for the bird. This is the whole poem:

A little fool lies here

Whom I held dear—
A starling in the prime
Of his brief time,
Whose doom it was to drain
Death’s bitter pain.
Thinking of this, my heart
Is riven apart.
Oh reader! Shed a tear,
You also, here.
He was not naughty, quite,
But gay and bright,
And under all his brag
A foolish wag.
This no one can gainsay
And I will lay
That he is now on high,
And from the sky,
Praises me without pay
In his friendly way.
Yet unaware that death
Has choked his breath,
And thoughtless of the one
Whose rime is thus well done.

Reveling in the contrast is irresistible: Mozart absented himself from

his father’s funeral, then buried a common bird with pomp and flute
music and original poetry! Many believe that the starling’s funeral was
simply a farce—one of Mozart’s many indecorous social shenanigans.
Others suggest that the starling service provided Mozart an avenue for
catharsis in the face of his father’s death and perhaps also a transference
of duty; he was doing for the starling what he believed he ought to have
done for Leopold. I find truth in both these views. A fancy bird funeral
certainly would have appealed to Mozart’s sense of the absurd.
Meanwhile, for all Mozart’s complicated genius, his personal
relationships were touched with a childlike simplicity and a deep
neediness. Feeling that he had neglected Leopold, Wolfgang surely found
comfort in the ritual of a funeral, a receptacle for his displaced grief.
But there is a third way of thinking of the funeral, one that would be
obvious to anyone who has lived with a starling. While honoring the
psychological nuance of the theories above, we can also recognize that
Mozart felt honest sorrow over the loss of his bird. In the three years he
lived with Star, Mozart had struggled for professional recognition; faced
periods of financial despair; become estranged from his sister Nannerl,
the bosom confidante of his youth; and lost two beloved children and his
father. Through all of this, the starling had been present as an always-
cheerful, ever-mischievous companion, a mirror of what was liveliest
and most creative in Mozart’s own soul, a simple, constant friend.
Frivolous rhyming cannot mask the truths contained in this poem.
Mozart knew the funeral was silly and over the top. But it was also
sincere, an act of affection, a parting gift. He buried his bird in the
garden and marked the tiny grave with a stone.
Physically, Wolfgang was not a strong specimen, and he knew it. He
was small—probably just over five feet—and slender. In the fine
unfinished oil painting by Joseph Lange (Mozart’s brother-in-law,
husband of Constanze’s sister Aloysia) on display in Salzburg, Mozart is
pensive, with soft cheeks and the suggestion of bags beneath his eyes.
The painting shows just his face, and one can imagine such a head
topping a doughy body, but it was not so. Mozart was always thin. He
had never been in robust health, had suffered recurring episodes of
rheumatic fever as a child, and was bedridden time and again with
respiratory ailments, some of them life-threatening. He survived bouts of
scarlet fever, acute infectious polyarthritis, and a juvenile case of
smallpox that left him pockmarked for life. In the years preceding his
death, Mozart was often bedridden with severe colic and several other
unidentifiable illnesses. In spite of his assurances in the death letter to his
father that he was always serene in public, he suffered from the
headaches, melancholia, and anxiety to which profoundly creative minds
are often prone. And he was, like his father, a bit of a hypochondriac.
Even with all of this, at age thirty-four, with a desk and mind full of
unfinished compositions, with a docket of travel to performances of
successful work, and with a family that was not yet comfortably
provided for, Mozart was unprepared for his final illness, which caught
him unawares.

Unfinished portrait of Mozart. (Joseph Lange, 1782)

In July of 1791, before the onset of his sickness, Mozart was

approached by an anonymous stranger and engaged to compose a
requiem for the wife of an illustrious Viennese gentleman. The
commission was generous; Mozart accepted, began the work, then set it
aside to complete La clemenza di Tito for the coronation of Emperor
Leopold II in Prague.
It sounds apocryphal. Mozart, unknowingly near his own death, is
drawn into a prescient, ghostly commission by a shadowy figure who in
some biographies wears a dark hood. And yet it is true. The stranger was
an emissary of Count Franz von Walsegg, whose wife, Anna, had been
only twenty-two years old when she’d died suddenly in February. (The
seeming Victorian-Gothic depiction of the emissary in the story—gaunt,
hooded, and shadowy—was actually an accurate description of
Walsegg’s courier Franz Anton Leitgeb, who was tall and thin with a
taciturn disposition and a dark Turkish complexion and who always
dressed in gray.) It is likely that Mozart knew both the count and his
young wife, as Walsegg often invited the Viennese cognoscenti to his
country home for music. One of the reasons Mozart was approached
anonymously might have to do with the count’s proclivity to commission
music and then to pass the work off as his own. When guests would ask
about the composer of a piece that had been performed in his parlor,
Walsegg is known to have asked them to guess. And when the response
was a polite “Well, it sounds like it could have come from your own
quill,” the count would just fix a pleased little smile on his lips. Passing
off a requiem by the great Mozart as his own tribute to his beloved dead
wife was the probable motive for secrecy.
Mozart gloried in recognition, but he needed the commission and
likely believed that the truth would eventually come out. Indeed, by the
time the completed Requiem was delivered, after Mozart’s death,
everyone knew who it was for and who had written it. The count is said
to have been angry but was perhaps placated by the fact that the
composition increased in value with Mozart’s death.
While at work on the Requiem in November of 1791, Mozart became
sick quite suddenly. His symptoms included swelling of the hands and
feet, high fever, rash, and intense sweating. His body became so bloated
and painful that he could barely move. Constanze provided light cambric
cloth to her sister Sophie, who sewed a new dressing gown that
Wolfgang could put on without sitting up—he just held out his arms so
the robe could be slipped on and tied behind his neck with a ribbon.
Even in such a state, he claimed to be delighted with his sister-in-law’s
clever industry and declared himself happy to wear the new gown.
In his last weeks, Mozart worked on the composition from his
sickbed, poignantly aware that he was penning a requiem as the potential
imminence of his own funeral mass became more and more real to him.
It is not overly romantic to believe that this gives the work much of its
power and urgency. There are passages of the Requiem that might be
overlaid with sections of Mozart’s death letter to his father—sweet,
restrained harmonies that welcome death as a consoling friend. But these
are just moments. The music rises and twists into darker moods and
fearsome crescendos. The music of the Requiem is never ugly. It
proclaims Mozart’s foundational faith in beauty and harmony while
embracing gloom, shadow, even fright, with forthrightness. He is more
honest in his music than he could ever be in his letters.
And again it sounds apocryphal, but it is nevertheless true that Mozart
continued to work with all the dwindling strength of his mind, body, and
spirit to complete the Requiem as he lay dying. He could not have helped
but recognize (and weep over) the symbolic significance, and yet his
motive was in part practical. When the work was done, Constanze could
collect the handsome second half of the commission. He worked with the
guilt of a man who knew he should have done more.*
Mozart could not sit fully upright; the score was spread all over his
bed, across his bloated belly. On the working manuscript, his last notes
were scrawled in an ill and quivering hand. Unlike the scene in the
movie Amadeus, Salieri was not there taking dictation on how the
Requiem should be completed. It was Wolfgang’s good friend the
composer Franz Xaver Süssmayr who finished the work after Mozart’s
death, with the maestro’s instruction in his head and in a passably
Mozartian manner. Naturally, purists criticize—there are errors of
harmony and an occasionally glaring mismatch of style. Even so, most
modern conductors prefer Süssmayr’s attempt over those that came after.
Mozart died on the fifth of December. His symptoms were consistent
with rheumatic fever, but a deadly streptococcal infection was sweeping
Vienna at the time, and modern scholarship suggests that this is what
killed him, perhaps preying on a system already weakened by the fever.
It is almost certain that the medical treatment of the day hastened the
hour of death. Mozart was let for over two liters of blood in the days just
before his passing, and immediately before he died, he was wrapped in
cold compresses.* Constanze’s younger sister Sophie had argued that the
compresses would be a shock to her brother-in-law, now delirious and
barely conscious. They were applied by the doctor over her objections,
and Mozart died soon after. Sophie’s bedside recollections are the only
extant first-person account of the event, and they have the ring of truth,
though her remembrance that Mozart died with the timpani part of the
Requiem upon his lips seems a stretch. The physical details at the time of
death—the severity of the bloating, the stench, the discoloration and
projectile vomiting—all of this was suppressed for years, believed to be
unfitting to the reputation of a great composer. But listening to the
Requiem, we can find all these things. Ugly, feared, redeemed in the
whole.

The fact that Mozart was buried in a common grave and at a service with
no mourners present has long been taken as a disparaging comment upon
musical Vienna—a society that first overlooked and then spat upon its
most gifted composer at the hour of his death. But the circumstances of
Mozart’s funeral were entirely in line for those of the middle class after
the reforms of young Emperor Joseph II, who, in a frenzy of enlightened
rationalism, worked to overturn the extravagance of previous
generations, invoking a sense of practical simplicity and propriety in
funerary matters. Bodies of respectable citizens were laid out in the
church (St. Stephen’s Cathedral, in Mozart’s case), then wrapped in a
linen shroud and, within two days of passing, transported in a reusable
coffin to a graveyard outside the central city and there buried in a
common grave of six to twelve bodies, each doused with lime to prevent
stench and the spread of disease. Mozart himself was a supporter of such
reforms.*
The Mozarts were not well off at the time of Wolfgang’s death, but
any notion of a “pauper’s burial” comes from a misunderstanding of the
customs of the very particular time and place. Myth has been heaped
upon myth. In 1856 the Vienna Morgen-Post published an excerpt from a
memoir by someone named Joseph Deiner, a man who claimed he was
present at the funeral. The author had a dramatic winter tempest rain
down on Mozart’s small funeral cortège.

The night of Mozart’s death was dark and stormy; at the funeral,
too, it began to rage and storm. Rain and snow fell at the same
 time, as if Nature wanted to shew her anger with the great
composer’s contemporaries, who had turned out extremely
sparsely for his burial.

In fact, records from the time report mild weather and just an
occasional light mist on the day of the funeral, but the tale of a poignant
storm was gleefully adopted by biographers and remains strong in the
popular imagination.
To say that Vienna forgot Mozart or metaphorically spat upon him in
the manner of funerary arrangements is to ignore the gracious outpouring
of attention in his honor that marked the following days and months in
Vienna and beyond. There were notices in the papers across Europe. On
December 10, Emanuel Schikaneder joined others to arrange a funeral
Mass in St. Michael’s Church near the Hofburg, where completed
portions of Mozart’s Requiem were performed. In Prague, there was a
grand memorial service with a full orchestra and chorus, and there were
said to be several thousand in attendance.

Like any good Mozart pilgrim in Vienna, I slated an entire day for the
exploration of St. Marx Cemetery, where Mozart was buried two days
after he died. When I was confirming directions at the tourist information
center (I am an obsessive confirmer during travel), the gentleman behind
the desk told me I would take the 71 tram outside the central city to the
Landstrasse District. He wrote this down and handed me the paper with a
little smile that struck me as odd. The people of Vienna are helpful and
friendly, but restrained, not at all smiley. When I was buying tickets to a
local music performance, the ticket seller switched from German to
English to talk to me before I’d said a word. “How did you know I was
American?” I asked. “Because you smiled at me,” he said. He laughed
and added, “Don’t worry, it’s nice. We don’t mind.” Later a volunteer
docent at the tram museum explained the tourist information worker’s
smirk. Joseph II’s reform required that all burials take place beyond the
city’s main wall for sanitary purposes, and this cemetery was created to
fit this edict, opened as a burial place in 1784. For the last hundred years,
the tram line from the city center to the cemetery has been the same—the
71. To “take the 71” is a colloquialism for dying, sort of like “kick the
bucket.”
It was a cool, sunny October morning. I was in love with Vienna; I
was in love with Mozart; I scoffed at my jet lag; I couldn’t wait to board
this tram. It took me past ornate government buildings, through fancy
neighborhoods, into less-fancy neighborhoods, past tract houses, and
eventually to a vast industrial area that looked dark and gray, even in the
sun. Here the tram stopped, and the driver, whom I’d pestered about
letting me know where to get off, glanced at me and tipped his head
toward the open door. “Cemetery?” I asked. He nodded; other passengers
nodded. I slowly disembarked. The stop was in the middle of a busy
highway with traffic rushing both ways on either side of the bus shelter. I
tried to orient my tourist’s map and decided to head uphill, though every
direction would take me along a speeding, dirty, multilane expressway. I
followed the local people, who seemed to know how to cross the street
without dying, consulted my map again, and walked tentatively
northward. Soon there was no one. Who would walk here? It was just me
and cars.
After about fifteen minutes of walking, wondering, and consoling
myself with the uplifting traveler’s perspective that I was, at least,
somewhere, if not where I’d hoped to be, a bald man dressed all in biker-
style black came toward me. I mustered my courage. “Sprechen Sie
Englisch?” “Leetle,” he answered, lifting his thumb and forefinger to
show me the measure of just how little, in fact, he knew. No light
showed between them. “St. Marx Cemetery?” I ventured. “This St.
Marx!” He was jubilant. He pointed to the big green highway overpass
sign, and indeed it read ST. MARX. Hmm. “Cemetery?” He looked
confused. “Dead people?” I offered. Nothing. “Dead.” I dropped
sideways as if dying. I let my tongue loll out of my mouth and my eyes
roll back in my head. “Dead.” “Oh!” he yelled. “Friedhof!” Yes!
Friedhof! How had I let myself be so lousy a tourist as to leave the
apartment without the word Friedhof? We almost jumped up and down
together. “Friedhof! Yes, yes!” He pointed up the hill and around the
corner. We shook hands warmly, and I walked on. Eventually I found
myself skirting an endless concrete wall. The highway was still wide and
busy, but buildings seemed to be farther apart, and perhaps there was a
residential district ahead in the area that seemed to have sun rather than
gray hovering over it. But I saw no graveyard. When a young woman
walked by pushing her fancy German baby stroller, I asked, “St. Marx
Friedhof?” and in precise, heavily accented English, she told me that it
was just ahead, perhaps ten more minutes. “Are you searching for
Mozart?” “Um, yes, actually.” “He is just up the central road in the
cemetery grounds, turn left at the iron cross.” I thanked her and
wondered if, at any moment, I would be joining a stream of Mozart
pilgrims, all of us lining up to turn left at the cross. But no. I finally
found the tall brick archway, its iron gate ajar. I walked through. A
graveyard quiet descended, and I was in another world, completely
alone.
I had heard that the cemetery was reclaimed and restored in the
1970s, so I was expecting a pretty, parkish place. Instead, there was
something much better. The upkeep appeared to involve just a quick and
occasional mowing around the central road, as the woman had called it—
more of a wide, stone-strewn path. Beyond this were acres of graves, all
of them a hundred and fifty years old, two hundred, more. They were
surrounded by ancient tangled pines, chestnuts, maples. Weedy grasses
grew among the rows and rows of grave markers, all green with moss
and lichens. There were angel heads and devil wings and statues of little
girls gazing up into the face of God. All of them were losing heads and
limbs; the words on the markers were often too worn, too crumbled, to
read. There were demons and gargoyles and the hushed whispers of
spirits. There were also birds—chickadees, and English robins, and
arguing crows. (Vienna is very urban; there are not many trees. Though I
dutifully carried my little binoculars everywhere, I had seen very few
birds—suddenly I was surrounded.) To my mind, this cemetery was the
quietest, most magical, most beautiful, most haunted place in all of
Vienna. Eventually I did see a few other people, graveyard wanderers,
just here and there. But solitude was easy to come by, even at the
memorial of the cemetery’s most famous inhabitant. Just as the woman
with the stroller had told me, up the hill I found a small, old, iron sign,
with an arrow pointing left and the word MOZARTGRAB. Another twenty
yards or so, there was the memorial. I gathered fallen chestnuts and
dropped them into my pockets as I approached the circle of raked
pebbles and a lackluster stone.
No one knows where Mozart is actually buried. To save space, and to
allow for the turnover of graves every ten years (bones were haphazardly
dug up and replaced with new bodies), Joseph mandated that there be no
gravestones on the actual graves in his new cemetery. Instead, individual
grave markers were lined up along the fence, often some distance from
the place of burial. Seventeen years after Mozart was buried, with
interest in his biography growing, Constanze and her new husband tried
to locate the gravesite, but no one could tell them anything. Gravediggers
waved their shovels in the general direction of the area that Mozart was
rumored to lie. There is a skull held by the Mozarteum in Salzburg that
early gravediggers claimed they had removed from Mozart’s grave, but
their story has been discredited. Modern sleuthing has revealed nothing
more.
In the general vicinity of Mozart’s burial place, there was once a
granite memorial with a larger-than-life-size statue of a mourning Muse,
but this was moved in 1874 to the Zentralfriedhof, the central municipal
cemetery, to stand alongside the memorials for all the other great
composers buried in Vienna—Beethoven, Schubert, Salieri, Brahms,
Strauss, Schoenberg, and many more. A ghostly garden of musicians.
The statue is beautiful, and the cemetery is well kept, but it is far busier
with tourists than St. Marx. I much preferred the haunted, gothic silence
of the smaller burial ground.

Now the gray had lifted, and the day was all sun and birds. But the
preternatural stillness of the graveyard was palpable, simultaneously
beautiful and eerie. I walked over to Mozart’s memorial and sat down at
the base of the stone. There was a pillar inlaid with a marble plate that
said, simply, W. A. MOZART 1756–1791. Leaning on the base of the pillar
was a pale carved cherub, perhaps half my height. His waist was
wrapped in a loose cloth, and he held the end of it in one hand, maybe to
keep it from falling off. His other elbow leaned on the pillar, his head in
his hand. I crouched to look up at his face, expecting it to capture a sense
of loss, of sadness, or perhaps a wistful listening to the music of the
heavens. But this cherub conveyed none of these things. His attitude was
completely disaffected, aloof, almost annoyed, as if to say, Seriously? I
have to stand here forever and it’s not even his grave? The cherub’s feet
were covered, this day, in blooming pink begonias and a recent offering
of cut yellow roses, just beginning to wilt. I laughed at the plight of the
cherub.
And yet Mozart has been honored at this exact place for more than
two hundred years. Even though the original memorial was moved, true
Mozart devotees make their way here, to St. Marx. Thousands upon
thousands have visited; at this very spot, there have been millions of
prayers and dreams of music and personal wishes and raising of faces to
heaven in search of Mozart’s spirit. This graveyard does in fact
somewhere cradle the dust of the maestro’s bones. And yes, I felt
something. A spirit, a rush, a presence. A sadness. A consolation. The
breeze lifted my hair and set it back down again. My imagination ran
happy and wild.
 The disgruntled cherub at Mozart’s memorial, St. Marx Cemetery, Vienna.
(Photograph by the author)

By the time Star died, the Mozarts had been forced by financial
constraints to leave their beloved Domgasse rooms and move to smaller
apartments outside the town center. Their new lodging was on
Landstrasse, not far from St. Marx Cemetery, where Mozart would be
buried. While planning my journey to Vienna I dreamed of a little
pilgrimage I would make, walking somber and peaceful and wistful,
from the graveyard to the site of these lodgings. Here I would sneak
about the grounds, or if the current owner was home and seemed kind, I
would ask whether I might walk in the garden. I was sure that after all
my thinking and imagining about Star’s funeral, I would somehow intuit
which tiny patch of garden was the likely gravesite of Mozart’s starling.
So I had to laugh at my disillusionment when I discovered that the place
where I’d originally disembarked the tram—the industrial area with its
giant buildings decorated with the logo of a prominent mobile phone
company—was just the place the Mozarts had lived when Star died. No
old houses. Not even new houses. Not a shred of earth. Just concrete and
cars and a wasteland of industry as far as the eye could see.
Even so. It was silly. It was a flight of fancy, I knew. But the chestnut
trees in the graveyard were so old, so twisted, so lovely. The autumn
chestnuts on the ground around Mozart’s memorial were so round, so
glowing brown. Mozart had been buried in this earth for ten years or so
before what was left of his bones had been raked aside to make space for
new bodies. Mozart’s body could have nourished these trees. These
chestnuts in my pocket, to my mystical mind, bore an authentic
connection to his physical presence on earth, and the fruitfulness of his
work beyond that life. It is not such a strange notion—a material
continuance, a sense of life after death that is both poetically mystical
and fully earthen. Rachel Carson articulated this sensibility in her article
“Undersea,” published in a 1937 issue of the Atlantic Monthly:
“Individual elements are lost to view, only to reappear again and again in
different incarnations in a kind of material immortality… Against this
cosmic background the life span of a particular plant or animal appears
not as a drama complete in itself, but only as a brief interlude in a
panorama of endless change.”
Clutching my Mozart-imbued chestnuts, I asked Siri to help me find
the exact address of the Mozarts’ Landstrasse apartment. I stood on the
sidewalk, scanned the wires, and hoped starlings would appear. They
would provide psychological closure, and a tidy ending for this book.
But none did. I thought I might at least enjoy a quiet moment of
contemplation here on the concrete, but now my tram, the 71 death tram,
was fast approaching. There wouldn’t be another for more than half an
hour and I was hungry. Quickly, rashly, joyfully, I pulled the roundest
and fattest chestnut from my pocket, kissed it, and tucked it into a corner
of the sidewalk. Star’s new grave marker, as accurate, at least, as
Mozart’s. With a strange energy, I jumped on the bus.
While I wandered the dreamy quiet of St. Marx Friedhof, it was the
Requiem that swirled through my head. But when I set my chestnut on
the gray concrete that had to stand in for Star’s tiny, forgotten grave, it
was the wild, swirling cadenzas from A Musical Joke that filled my mind
and heart. Even more than his poem, this flight of musical fancy was
Mozart’s truest elegy for his small friend, the commonest of birds who
could never have known that he was joining with a musical genius in the
highest purpose of creative life: to disturb us out of complacency; to
show us the wild, imperfect, murmuring harmony of the world we
inhabit; to draw our own lives into the song.
 Coda

One of the queries I get frequently from friends is what I will “do with
Carmen” now that I’ve finished this book. The answer seems obvious to
me. Carmen is a member of my household, and I will look after her as
long as she lives. There is no telling how long that will be. A good age
for a wild starling is six years or so, but captive birds can die young from
some wisp of a draft or live for fifteen years and more. If for some
reason I arrive at a place in my life where I cannot keep her, then I will
find a home where she will be welcomed with delight. But I’ll offer one
last thought: Carmen brings joy and depth and insight to our family. I
believe she has a good life, and I am glad she did not die with her nest
mates. But not one single day passes that I do not wish I could see her fly
free.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

More than anything else I’ve written, Mozart’s Starling was created in
community, beneath a “cloud of witnesses.” I am profoundly grateful to
all who nourished this project in so many ways. For the sharing of
insight and expertise: the staff at the Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg,
especially Dr. Ulrich Leisinger; the staff at Mozarthaus in Vienna,
particularly Constanze Hell; Speight Jenkins, Seattle Opera director
emeritus; Dave Beck of Classical KING FM; Dr. Adela Ramos, Pacific
Lutheran University; Dr. Timothy Gentner, UC San Diego; Dr. Meredith
West, Indiana University; Dr. David Rothenberg, New Jersey Institute of
Technology; Dr. Walter Koenig, Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Dr. Dennis
Paulson, University of Puget Sound Slater Museum, emeritus; David
Maskowitz, master tracker; Chris Anderson, Washington Department of
Fish and Wildlife; Pat Burnett, Edmonds Community College; Samantha
Randall; Dr. Christopher Plumb; Dr. Albert Furtwangler; Dell Gossett;
Dr. Rob Duisberg; all who contributed their knowledge of the German
language; and so many others who assisted along the way. For
hospitality: the ever-fabulous Benedictine sisters of St. Placid Priory;
Cathy Cowell and all the good people at Whiteley Center, Friday Harbor;
Wendy Dion at Yoga Lodge, Whidbey Island; and my lovely Airbnb
hosts in Vienna and Salzburg. For writerly commiseration: Maria Dolan,
David Laskin, David Williams, Lang Cook, Martha Silano, Susan Tweit,
Kathryn True, Anne Linnea, Michelle Goodman, Sage Cohen, Lynda
Mapes, Anne Copeland, and all the Seattle7 writers. For more support
than I deserve: the Unspeakables. For generous and intelligent
professional guidance: my editor, Tracy Behar, at Little, Brown; my
literary agent, Elizabeth Wales; and my copyeditors, Tracy Roe and
Pamela Marshall. For undertaking the thankless task of long-term
Carmen sitting (a favor one could only ask of dear friends): Trileigh
Tucker, Mark Ahlness, Janeanne Houston, and Jane Davis. For the
sharing of comfort and joy during the winding writing process, thanks to
my family: cutest-ever parents, Jerry and Irene Haupt; amazing sister,
Kelly Haupt, and sister-in-law, Jill Story; and sweet (because I know
they love being called “sweet”) parents-in-law, Ginny and Al
Furtwangler. For creative mayhem: Carmen; Delilah; hens Ophelia,
Ethel, Winifred, and Pansy (rest in peace, Marigold); and all the more-
than-human creatures that crossed my path during the writing of this
book. For intrepid spirit: the memory of Idie Ulsh (1936–2015),
naturalist-doyenne of the Pacific Northwest, who inspired thousands
with her delight in the wild world (Idie, I still want to be you when I
grow up). For courage: Rachel Carson, Beatrix Potter, Georgia O’Keeffe,
and all the poets, writers, artists, and composers who found their
creativity upon the wild earth and whose work visits across time in the
form of word, line, song, and sound. And for love: Tom and Claire.
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lyanda Lynn Haupt is an ecophilosopher, naturalist, and author of

several books, including The Urban Bestiary, Crow Planet, Pilgrim on
the Great Bird Continent, and Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds. A
winner of the Washington State Book Award and the Sigurd F. Olson
Nature Writing Award, she lives in Seattle with her husband and
daughter.
 Books by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild

Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and
Other Lessons from Darwin’s Lost Notebooks

Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds

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* Some suggest that the star part of the name refers to the little white spots that shimmer on the
tips of the bird’s black feathers during the nonbreeding season. It is impossible to know the
genesis of the name for certain.
* There are exaltations of larks and murders of crows. A flock of flying starlings is called,
beautifully, a murmuration, but there is no official name for a terrestrial flock, as far as I know.
Plague seems appropriate.
* Pigeons are officially considered feral rather than invasive. Early in this country’s history, rock
pigeons (the common urban species) were brought over from England, propagated, kept by
settlers, and carried along on journeys west as sources of food. All the urban pigeons we see
today are descendants of these pioneer pigeons, many of whom escaped. Their native habitat
includes rocky cliffs, and we can imagine them in such places when we see them on high city
buildings.
* It is difficult to sex starlings accurately before they reach breeding age, the first spring after
hatching. Often the irises of female birds are more defined around the pupil than those of young
male birds, but this measure is subjective and only about 70 percent accurate. I used calipers to
measure Carmen’s skull, which was in the female range, but ranges overlap—a large female skull
can be larger than a small male skull. Once the birds acquire their breeding characteristics, things
change. Males have longer, shaggier plumage on their shoulders and a punky look to their neck
feathers, which are raised during singing and display. The bases of the bills also change color
during breeding season and match our cultural stereotyping: girls’ are pink, boys’ are blue.
* There are scores of Mozart biographies in the world, and though they typically agree on the
known facts, they all provide varied, contradictory views of the composer’s personality. When
veering into matters having to do with Mozart’s nature or inner life, I focus as much as possible
on what I have been able to glean from his own words as they appear in his hundreds of
published letters and relied primarily on two fine translations, which I use interchangeably in this
book: Mozart’s Letters, Mozart’s Life, with letters selected, edited, and translated by Robert
Spaethling; and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Life in Letters, with selected letters edited by Cliff
Eisen and translated by Stewart Spencer. I recommend both volumes highly.
* Later, Mozart would refer to the bird by the more common spelling Vogel Staar. Today in
German the species is typically referred to as Vogel Star.
* Doing one’s own hair might not sound so impressive, but it was common even among the
middle classes to have a friseur make home visits to do up the high styles of both men’s and
women’s hair or wigs.
* It’s important to do some research before using natural limbs in a bird’s home, as some bark is
toxic to certain species.
* I’ve heard some naturalists question this, but Carmen was a perfect experiment. Her first
complete autumn molt filled the house with clouds of feathers. (It is astonishing how many
feathers are layered onto one little bird—about three thousand on a starling.) It was a nerve-
racking few weeks for me. Every time I came home, Delilah would greet me at the door with
feathers in her mouth, and I’d rush to Carmen’s cage while searching the floor for blood and bird
entrails, but she was always safe and happy. Like most cats, Delilah just enjoyed playing with
feathers. Once I survived the psychological torment of the molt, I admired Carmen’s fresh, starry
breast. Come spring, all her wild colleagues had lost their white tips, but Carmen’s, protected
from the elements, were as pristine as ever.
* Though starlings are just as reviled in New York City as they are everywhere else in the U.S.,
this genesis story is honored in the Bronx with a Starling Avenue, a Schieffelin Avenue, and a
Schieffelin Street, and it is rumored that one of New York City starlings’ favorite roosts is Central
Park’s Shakespeare Garden.
* Droppings would have to build up in an area’s soil for at least a couple of years in order for
levels of the fungus to become dangerous, and no case of histoplasmosis has been proven to be
connected to starling droppings, but the possibility still causes concern and is often mentioned in
dissertations on starling damage.
* For comparison, that same year the USDA killed 730 cats, 5,321 white-tailed deer, 61,702
coyotes, and 16,500 double-crested cormorants.
* Ethologist Konrad Lorenz, who also raised a starling, termed this bill motion yawning. In spite
of the risk that it might be confused with baby-bird food begging, I prefer to call it gaping. After
all, yawning is equally confusing, as the birds are not sleepy when they are exploring this way.
* In this, I realize she is like many creatures, including humans, who use their mode of eating to
explore and learn about the world. Baby humans put things in their mouths. So do baby bears.
Parrots learn with their tongues (they cannot learn to count objects by looking at dots on cards, as
pigeons can, but they can count if they are allowed to explore raised dots with their funny, big
parrot tongues). Even we grown apes turn things over, exploring visually, smelling, acquainting
ourselves with new objects as we would if we were going to pop them into our mouths. Perhaps
some of this is lost in very recent times, when much of what we encounter comes from a flat
screen—we see different images, but always with the same texture, fragrance, and weight.
* Sherman Alexie chose this quote for the epigraph to his Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time
Indian; he attributed it to W. B. Yeats, and others have done the same, but the origin seems to be
French surrealist Paul Éluard.
* I would have her come out and read with me, but like many birds, Carmen acquires a kind of
confused agitation as the sun goes down. Keepers of budgies and other pet birds will recognize
the behavior; if she’s not inside her aviary when darkness falls, she gets disoriented, bashing into
walls and windows that she navigates readily during the day, and she is easily startled. We make
sure she is closed safely in her aviary by sunset.
* The physical exterior of the Graben apartment building still stands, but the interior has been
extensively remodeled as a hotel, so the rooms are nothing like they were during Mozart’s life.
* The evocative phrase “more-than-human world” was first used twenty years ago by philosopher
David Abram in his book The Spell of the Sensuous. It has since become a well-loved expression
in the ecological literature.
* This is generally true. It seems that about one in ten female starlings does have the ability to
make these sounds. Or perhaps all female starlings have the physiological ability and only this
smaller fraction makes use of it.
* Purina Lab Chow, now called LabDiet, is a real thing, as I learned in college. One day I was
trying to find the office of a psychology professor with whom I had a meeting and walked past a
room with a sign on the door: . I didn’t even know there was an animal lab at my tiny
ANIMAL LAB

liberal arts school. Inside, I found drawers full of rodents, and I opened every one; in the last
drawer, there were six fluffy Siberian teddy-bear hamsters. This species of hamster does not do
well in groups, especially in small spaces; they become aggressive and even cannibalistic. The
hostility of this group was focused on one sweet, cream-colored, long-haired male, who was
covered with bites, had part of one ear nibbled off, and was bleeding from several wounds. I did
not think, in the moment, about the fact that I might be ruining someone’s thesis research. I just
plucked up the bleeding hamster and put it in the left pocket of my jacket. I looked quickly
around the room. Nothing; no one. So into the right pocket I dropped a handful of the hard,
square kibbles from the giant bag of Purina Lab Chow that slumped against the wall. Diogenes
the hamster (I was a philosophy major) lived many happy years.
* This is not true, of course, in places where birds gather in numbers, such as colonial nest sites
or autumn roosts, where the accumulated waste can be an eyesore and even a human-health
concern.
* Correct Latin would have been Ecce probatum est (“There is proof”).
* I am told that when properly pronounced, Sauschwanz, “pig’s tail,” rhymes with Rosenkranz.
* Sadly, Nannerl’s marriage was never happy—it is doubtful that her wishes were ever much
taken into account, day or night. Years before her marriage, she received a proposal from a fine
young man whom it seems she truly loved, but Leopold objected to his trade and prospects and
convinced Nannerl to refuse him. Leopold eventually urged his daughter into a marriage with
magistrate Johann Baptist Franz, an older widower with five children and a home that was a
loveless prison for Nannerl. She had three children of her own, including a son who was raised
by Leopold. After Nannerl was married, she and Wolfgang slowly fell out of touch.
** An example of the high-spirited, political wordplay: “If you are a poor blockhead—become a
K _ _ _ _ _ _ _ r, Kleriker [Cleric]. If you are a rich blockhead, become a landlord. If you are an
aristocratic but poor blockhead, become whatever you can so you may gain your bread. But if
you are a rich, aristocratic blockhead, become whatever you want to but not—I implore you—a
man of reason.”
* It is said so often that Mozart was a “working stiff” (as one well-known essay about the
maestro puts it) and composed only for work, for livelihood, for money. It is true that Mozart had
to write for a living, and the bulk of his working life was carried out with an eye to this reality,
but it is abundantly clear that he also wrote for fun, for art, and for love. He wrote for charity. He
wrote silly songs for the entertainment of friends, and beautiful parlor music for the delight of
guests. He wrote in his sleep. He wrote because he was Mozart, and music spilled forth from him,
constantly and by nature.
* Things took an unexpected turn when a certain Facebook video went viral: a muscular, tattooed
man was giving his colorful little finch a bath in the sink, just as we do with Carmen, only instead
of collecting water in a bowl, he used his cupped hands. Everyone on earth sent the video to me,
and I had the seemingly innocent thought, Wow, I bet Carmen would love this! Mistake. It was
tricky because my hands were much smaller than the guy’s in the video and also because Carmen
is much bigger than a finch. But she did love it and quickly became spoiled. For a long time she
refused the bowl, and insisted on my hands, which got me even wetter.
* Some scholars argue that only Mozart’s left ear was atypical, since in a couple of portraits, his
right ear is visible, though his left ear is always hidden. Nissen clearly refers to plural ears.
* Many respected scholars strongly disagree with Araya-Salas’s conclusions. One of the most
eloquent counterarguments comes from Emily Doolittle and Henrik Brumm in their paper “O
Canto do Uirapuru: Consonant Intervals and Patterns in the Song of the Musician Wren,”
published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies. Here, the authors outline parallels
between human conceptions of music and the song of a different South American wren, the aptly
named musician wren, and many other songbirds as well. They make the welcome suggestion
that explorations of such parallels are best approached from an interdisciplinary standpoint, with
experts in music, ornithology, and audiology sharing their knowledge, to prevent one-sided, or
simply mistaken, conclusions.
* The brown creeper is a tiny songbird with woodpecker-like adaptations for creeping up barky
tree trunks as it searches for insects. It is dark brown, like bark, but with a bright white belly, a
slender curved bill, and a stiff tail to support it vertically. It is one of my all-time-favorite birds
and was also beloved by the late social and environmental activist Hazel Wolf. I met Hazel when
I began working at the Seattle Audubon Society years ago, where she was the secretary until her
death at almost 101. I got in the habit of meeting her at her simple apartment in Seattle’s Capitol
Hill neighborhood and taking her to lunch every month or so. We would walk to the little Thai
restaurant down the block. The walk took longer if it happened to be election time—Hazel would
make me join her in leaving flyers on every door we passed to “get out the vote.” She was
grassroots, old school, and formidable. Almost every lunch, she would tell me about how elated
she felt the first time she’d seen a brown creeper, a memory that circled in her elder’s mind and
one that I never tired of hearing. The brown creeper forages by clinging to the trunk of a tree with
its feet and making its way up. Up, up, up. It doesn’t skirt up and down like a woodpecker. Just
up. When it’s ready, the creeper flies down, and then begins its journey ever upward again. “Just
like me,” Hazel would say, twinkling.
* Many of the ideas about death expressed in this letter are inspired by Freemasonry, and Leopold
would have been familiar with its premises, having joined Wolfgang’s own lodge in Vienna.
Another influence was likely the thought of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (grandfather of
composer Felix Mendelssohn). A copy of his tract Phaidon, or The Immortality of the Soul was
well thumbed by the time it was listed in Mozart’s effects after his death.
* Though Mozart himself had composed pro bono works to fund the Freemasons’ organization in
support of the widows of composers and artists, he had failed to subscribe for his own soon-to-
be-widow. Without foundation, and with overt antifeminist sentiment, Constanze has been
vilified for centuries by Mozart biographers and fans as dull, unmusical, under-devoted,
moneygrubbing, and a generally undeserving partner to Mozart’s genius. But after Wolfgang’s
death, Constanze worked against all manner of difficulty to settle her husband’s debts and to face
the practical task of establishing financial stability for her little family: she appealed to the
emperor for a widow’s pension in light of Mozart’s service at the court; she organized concerts of
Mozart’s work and oversaw the publication of his music. Over time, she and the boys became
financially secure.
* The tools of the bloodletting treatment of Mozart’s time are on display in the collection of
mismatched artifacts on the top floor of the Mozarthaus museum. When I’d read about
bloodletting in the past, I had always imagined a small razor, but instead here was a horrific brass
box full of thick, hinged, hook-ended blades, never sterilized, of course, that looked like
instruments of torture.
* It is usually suggested that Mozart was buried only in a linen shroud, but of all the Josephian
reforms, the edict to allow only shrouds, no coffins, for burial was met with the most public
outcry. It went one step too far. Several months before Mozart’s passing, Joseph reluctantly lifted
this element of his edict and allowed families, for a fee, to purchase a simple coffin that would be
deposited in the common graves. Volkmar Braunbehrens notes in his detailed Mozart in Vienna
that in the list of Mozart’s funeral expenses, there is a line item for the hearse. Hearses were
provided for free unless a coffin was purchased—evidence, argues Braunbehrens, that Mozart
might have been buried in a coffin. He notes also that Georg Nikolaus von Nissen, Constanze’s
second husband and one of Mozart’s early biographers, wrote vaguely that “the coffin was
deposited in a common grave and every other expense avoided.” But Nissen wasn’t there; he had
Constanze as a source, but she did not make the funeral arrangements, and it is possible that he
just assumed there was a coffin. There is for now no definitive answer.
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