Articles

Abstract:

Many birds sing while they are on the wing or perched high in vegetation. They obviously require different sense impressions when the tendency to sing becomes predominant and this leads them to rise from the region nearer to the ground where they breed and feed. The various kinds of song behaviour can be arranged in a series, starting with singing in shrubs (blackcap, garden warbler, nightingale), via singing within vegetation but after moving upwards (robin, wren), to singing at the upper limit of the vegetation (blackbird, dunnock) and beyond, in song flight (skylark, tree pipit). Rather than dealing with functional aspects, this article seeks qualitatively to elucidate how song perches and singing fit together, and how they connect with brooding and the other body-related modes of behaviour that take birds inside vegetation. Following an indication given by Rudolf Steiner, singing is considered as a way in which an individual animal relates to its species. Here, species is taken spiritually as the source of all the animal’s characteristics. This source is represented in the image of a landscape by the brightness and physical indefiniteness of the sky as opposed to the dark heaviness of earth, where qualities appear but do not originate. In its desire and search for ever renewed connection with its source, a songbird is a religious being, or rather it lives religion. Those birds that sing inside shrubs and trees belong to migrating species that arrive with the progress of spring when cosmic and terrestrial qualities come together, as can be seen in the phenomena of the vegetation, the intermediate region between heaven and earth. By that time, songbirds obviously find in the inner spaces of vegetation enough cosmic qualities to facilitate singing. In these inner spaces, the female birds are brooding in the islands of warmth that they have created for themselves. The species is not for them a spiritual entity on high that they aspire to, but one that below has immersed itself in formative processes of which a brooding bird makes itself a part.