See http://www.wildsanctuary.com/niche.pdf ("The Niche Hypothesis:
How Animals Taught us to Dance and Sing") first published in 1987.
The idea of bird dialects was studied and published for years before
the ones below came to light, mostly through the work of the late
Luis Baptista, Director of the Dept of Birds & Mammals at the
California Academy of Sciences, the department with which I was
affiliated during and immediately after my doctoral work in the late
70s/early 80s. Baptista's main subject was the White-crowned Sparrow
(Zonotrichia leucophrys). He trained many sets of young birds to
learn songs of other species as well as to alter the dialects of
other White-crowns whose offspring they were.
Although he never got around to publishing his findings, he was
coming to the realization, just before his untimely death a few years
ago, that one of the contributing factors of the syntax may well have
been the Soundscape Niche Effect, or the complex ways in which the
soundscape of each White-crown flock affected their ability to learn
their songs so that they would be effective within the acoustic turf
they had chosen to live. The special combination of the biophony,
geophony, and anthrophony, in each White-crowned environment, had,
after all, a likely and unique effect on how the song syntax
developed.
The idea that humans learned to dance, sing and drum from the
biophonies and geophonies of the natural world had also been around
for a while before I got to it (See Chapter 12 of the late Paul
Shepard's "The Others: How Animals Made us Human"), although not
fully developed into a thesis. Shepard's work is supported by the
parallel anthropological efforts of Louis Sarno, who has lived and
worked with the Ba'Aka Pygmies in a remote forest of the Central
African Republic, and Steven Feld, who worked closely with the Kaluli
of Papua New Guinea and who is now recording and studying a different
angle in Ghana. And, of course, the idea had been around for eons
before academics in the West wrapped their territorial minds around
the concept and gave it credence. It was, after all, practiced by
those human groups living much more closely connected to the natural
world.
Bernie Krause
>Interested in your thoughts about this one -
>http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?issueID=114&articleID=1452&utm_source=NationalWildlifeMagazine&utm_medium=E-newsletter&utm_term=april%2Fmay2007&utm_content=SingingintheBrain&utm_campaign=1
>or http://tinyurl.com/34faeu
>
>----------------------
>Suzanne
>http://web.tampabay.rr.com/swilli41/www
>Florida, USA
>
>"There is no use of worrying about shells, for you can't keep them
>from busting in your trench, nor you can't stop the rain...what is the
>use of worrying if you can't alter things?" - Alvin C. York, Medal of
>Honor Recipient, July 1, 1918
>
>
>
>"Microphones are not ears,
>Loudspeakers are not birds,
>A listening room is not nature."
>Klas Strandberg
>Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
--
Wild Sanctuary
P. O. Box 536
Glen Ellen, CA 95442
t. 707-996-6677
f. 707-996-0280
http://www.wildsanctuary.com
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