Once upon a time, if you wanted to present birdsong for human consumption, you had to do it with a pen and paper - or, in the case of the Elizabethan poets, quill and parchment.
"Jug, jug, jug, jug, tereu!" was a typically unmusical effort to render the complex song of the nightingale.
By the 1940s, however, the invention of the sound spectrograph allowed birdsong to be represented on paper as accurately as an individual fingerprint. The result - a sonogram - maps the two most important variants of the sound, frequency and time, and often looks quite beautiful as well, in a birdie-calligraphy kind of way. Check out some digital sonograms on the web at www.audubonmagazine.org/birdsongs.
High-tech recording equipment has also, needless to say, allowed the accumulation of online libraries of birds and their music. You can sort out your northern beardless-tyrannulet from your great-tailed grackle at askabiologist.asu.edu/expstuff/ experiments/birdsongs/birds_az.html.
David Rothenberg's duets with birds - and a good deal more besides - are available on www.whybirdssing.com. And if you just want a good old-fashioned chuckle, go for everyone's favourite David Attenborough moment, which is on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tv4u7TmDq8, and features a lyrebird doing a perfect imitation of the sound of a camera shutter. Messiaen would have dropped his pencil.
