All images of Palm cockatoos by ©Christina Zdenek
This piece accompanies the short film “Curious Encounter: Palm Cockatoo x Laurence Pike“.
One evening while Beatrice Harrison was playing cello in her garden in Sussex, England, nightingales began singing back to her from the nearby woods. The birds returned each evening throughout spring. These “live duets” were made famous when the BBC broadcast them annually, between 1924 and 1936. Although it was recently revealed that the BBC’s first live broadcast was faked—the recording crew spooked the birds, so a human whistler was brought in to play the part of the nightingale—subsequent broadcasts were authentic. This call-and-response between two species, in real time, enchanted listeners from around the world. The BBC’s managing director John Reith had initially dismissed Harrison’s proposal to broadcast the duets because “second-hand nature was not what people needed to hear.” But he later reflected that “a glamour of romance has flashed across the prosaic round of many a life.”1
Not everyone embraces performing “with” birds. The contemporary clarinetist David Rothenberg, who regularly plays along with nightingales in Berlin’s parks, describes an altercation with an elderly couple so angered by his disturbing “their” bird that the woman kicked his microphone into the mud and threatened to call the police. The couple’s objection was that the human musicians were self-indulgently spoiling the authenticity of the birdsong. However, for Rothenberg, both playing with and listening to the birds is a celebration of multispecies relationship. He describes lingering in the small hours after his human audience has departed—sometimes the birds don’t start to sing until well after midnight—his clarinet packed away, to simply listen to the nightingales: “This beautiful ancient music goes on and on, a reminder that at least something is still right with the world, right at the border between nature and culture where the most important contact is found.”2
Other musicians have attempted to draw connections between the human and avian worlds in ways that reach a larger audience. The violinist and ornithologist Hollis Taylor spends long nights capturing field recordings of pied butcher-birds in the Australian bush, then transcribes their song into compositions for human musicians to perform. Taylor’s “(re)compositions” aim to stay as true to the original vocalizations as possible, following the practice of the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who began transcribing birdsong in the 1950s.3
Less concerned with fidelity to original birdsong, the cellist Anthony Albrecht and the violinist Simone Slattery, cofounders of the Bowerbird Collective, create “cinematic concerts” that weave together recorded birdsong, original compositions, and historical pieces from composers inspired by avian music.4
The various encounters described here—between human musicians and wild nightingales in shared spaces, and between audiences and performers of music inspired by a variety of bird species—vary in approach, but all sit outside the realm of traditional science communication. Rather than attempting to educate audiences, they offer opportunities to pay attention to what the field philosopher Thom van Dooren calls the “life ways” of other species.5 This shift from explanation to encounter requires us to resist our deeply ingrained anthropocentrism, to let go of our need to control and rationalize and instead bear witness to encounters that unfold at the edges of our comprehension.
For the anthropologist Anna Tsing, bird-watching is an exercise in “finding empathetic attunement with another being . . . a matter of working through edge effects, that is, tentative sites of touching” between different species.6 Tsing writes about in-person bird-watching, but the idea translates to recorded encounters designed to attune us to the lives of other animals. These mediated encounters are particularly important in circumstances where venturing into wild landscapes can mean disturbing fragile or threatened habitats.
The short film Curious Encounter: Palm Cockatoo × Laurence Pike offers a case study in this kind of mediated encounter. Palm cockatoos (also known as the Goliath cockatoo or great black cockatoo) are the only bird known to whittle sticks to use for rhythmic drumming. These storm-gray parrots have an expressive crest and bright-red cheek patches that intensify in hue when they are alarmed or excited. They nest in the deep hollows of mature trees, and their drumming is thought to be a way for males to indicate the size of their hollow to potential mates and audibly mark their territory.
The palm cockatoo’s habitat ranges from Australia’s Cape York Peninsula up into the Aru Islands and Papua New Guinea. This habitat is being degraded by extreme weather events—climate change is driving worsening fires and cyclones—as well as large-scale mining projects, and as a result the birds have been classifed as endangered. Scientists from the Difficult Bird Research Group (DBRG) at Australian National University have been studying these birds since the late 1990s, and their work has involved undertaking long stints of isolated fieldwork, scaling precarious hollow trees, and braving the elements—as well as some of the world’s most venomous snakes.
Rob Heinsohn, founder of the DBRG, describes coming across the palm cockatoos by chance:7
I went up there [Cape York Peninsula] to do work on eclectus parrots in the late 90s. I was walking through the rainforest, and I heard this tapping sound: tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. On that occasion, I couldn’t work out what was doing it, but I kept hearing the sound, and one day I managed to creep up and I saw it was a beautiful, big, male palm cockatoo. He was displaying: He had this massive crest, and he was erecting it, he was flushing his cheeks and flapping his wings. And in between all of that, he would take a stick in his foot and tap it on the edge of the tree trunk. I just watched that for a while and thought, “What on earth is going on? What is he doing?” He was so immersed in this display he didn’t even see me, so I just stood there for ages, watching him.
After a while I worked out there was a female nearby and she was watching the whole thing. I began to get an idea of what was going on: He was displaying to her. I found a fellow called Graham Wood had described this behaviour back in the early 1980s, in a small bird journal. He just said these birds make a tool, and they use it to tap on the tree trunk. That was the basis for starting it all.
Christina Zdenek completed her master’s degree under Rob’s supervision. Rob describes her as a “ninja fieldworker,” capable of moving almost silently to capture the birds’ behavior on video. Her field footage is valuable, awe-inspiring scientific data. It has been used in multiple documentaries and news reports; most of the footage online of wild palm cockatoos was shot by Christina and her assistants. Yet how else, other than documentary or reportage, might this remarkable footage be used to engage nonscientific audiences? Rather than describing the birds’ behavior, debating whether the drumming constitutes “music,” or framing this within a conservation campaign, what might happen if we created space for a drummer to respond to these avian rhythms, allowing two approaches to rhythm-making to coexist in the same frame?
Perhaps one aspect of taking seriously the lives of other animals is accepting that their creative expressions exist entirely outside our cultural frameworks, that their intentions remain fundamentally opaque to us. This opacity need not be a problem to be solved. What happens when we embrace radical incomprehension as a starting point, accepting that the bird’s drumming and vocalizations exist in a universe of meaning entirely separate from our own, and that its beauty lies precisely in that separation? Yet we must also accept that all lives are entangled. As van Dooren and colleagues write: “All living beings emerge from and make their lives within multispecies communities.” How to resist the urge to explain the birds in human terms while also pointing to that entanglement, and to the disturbance that human activity has on the lives of other species, even in the unseen depths of a forest in far northern Queensland?
When the BBC returned to Beatrice Harrison’s garden on May 19, 1942, they were again set up to broadcast the nightingales’ song, this time without the accompanying cello. As the program was about to begin, a fleet of bombers en route to a raid in Germany passed overhead, and the live broadcast was canceled to avoid revealing the direction of the raid to enemy listeners. The recording went ahead, even if not broadcast live, and was later released as a record; the first side includes the sound of 197 bombers flying to the raid, the second side captures their return, 11 aircraft fewer.
A soundscape has three main components: biophony, or the collective sounds produced by living organisms in the environment, such as nightingales’ song; geophony, or natural nonbiological sounds such as those produced by wind or the ocean; and anthropophony, or human-generated sound, such as a fleet of World War II bombers. The combination of biophony and anthropophony in the BBC recording is a poignant record of a phenomenon that brought a natural wonder into the homes of people in need of respite from global conflict and economic instability, and it is also an aural metaphor for the ever-present threat of war at the time.
In the palm cockatoo recording, we left in the soundscape captured in Christina’s field recordings; insects hum, trees murmur in the wind, human field recordists shuffle, and at one point, Christina whispers notes to herself. This choice to not “clean up” the audio, to deliberately leave traces of the way human, bird, and habitat are inextricably entangled in the field encounters, is important to the storytelling.
We also resisted the documentary impulse to impose a neat narrative arc that moves from problem to solution, with an Attenboroughesque voice-over explaining threats and conservation efforts. This piece offers something more meditative: an extended encounter that privileges awe over understanding, wonder over explanation.
Yet as much as a mediated encounter can provide an embodied, even transcendental experience for the audience, it cannot replicate the awe and wonder of encountering another species in the flesh. The passages that follow here are edited from interviews with the scientists Rob Heinsohn and Christina Zdenek. They capture moments of “empathic attunement” between species that can occur only in one-to-one encounters.
Close Encounters: Notes from the Field
(The following passages are edited from interviews with Rob and Christina, conducted by Zoë Sadokierski in 2023.)
Rob Heinsohn:
When you first go there, they’re very wary and they just fly off and you think: “God, how am I ever going to work on that?” After a while, you get better at being quiet and less disturbing. But they still know you’re there most of the time.
And then sometimes you get this eerie experience where you walk up to where one is drumming or just at its nest hollow and it looks back at you. It’s obviously relaxed, and in that moment the bird’s studying me as much as I’m studying it. I can see it peering at me and cocking its head and trying to work out what I’m doing. You can just imagine this sort of intelligent thought process going on in his head where he’s going: “What the hell are you, why do you keep turning up? You didn’t used to be here. I guess I’m working out that you’re pretty harmless. But you’re pretty weird looking.”
It’s that thing where you’re looking into the eyes of another intelligent creature. And they are intelligent. You know, parrots in general are super intelligent. They’re right up there with chimpanzees and probably up there with humans in some dimensions. People have them in the lab, and they’re shown to have the numerical, language, or other abilities of a three- or four-year-old child. It’s the same sort of thing that the chimpanzee can do. And that’s just our ability to test them. There’s so much more going on in their heads that we can’t test.
Very similar to our neocortex, they have this massive forebrain. Which is the thought processing center that gives us executive function over everything we do—pulling thoughts together, planning, looking backwards, processing memories, and using information. They’ve got their equivalent.
One of my greatest joys in all of this is when I get to look into the eyes of this probably equally intelligent creature and connect. You have that moment—it might not last very long, but you have that moment where you look into each other’s eyes, and you feel like you’re equals.
Christina Zdenek:
I was in the grass chasing some palmy calls in 2010. I was on Indigenous land that I had approval to be on, a place I call “breeding alley” because it’s got so many hollows there. They’re constantly fighting because there are so many good quality hollows, they end up being unusually close together. I heard some real loud growling, and I came up and there was one male displaying on a hollow and another male calling nearby. They were both displaying, and I thought, “This is amazing.” I was pretty close, but they weren’t worried about me. You know that they’re really into it if that happens.
Then without warning, one of the males flies over to attack the other male sitting on its hollow. They reach out their legs, their claws, almost like raptors, and they meet in midair just above the hollow and interlock claws. And I just see two sets of wings, flapping rapidly to try to stay airborne, amongst all this growling, and they’re spinning around losing elevation as they go, and I hear them hit the ground together, entangled. I literally heard a thump as they whacked onto the ground. Then both flew off in opposite directions. Somehow the battle, the war, was settled. One of them must have won. It really opened my eyes on how they’re willing to fight to the death for these ancient, rare, time-invested, suitable hollows in the landscape. You know, three hundred-year-old trees, not too many of them have survived all the fires and the cyclones. Especially the fires. Not to mention the hundreds of hours they spend making epic nest platforms up to four meters deep inside the skyward facing big hollow!
This other story I’d like to share is a little bit more personal. The bird was making a nest, or I thought maybe a drumstick. I was pretty close to him. I thought, “Well, I’ll set myself up so I can film him at the hollow that I think he’ll go to next.” This is a bird that I’d worked on for two and a half months by this stage, I’d spent a lot of time with that individual bird. I could identify him confidently because he had a little round ring on his bill. I called him Ringo. Ringo Starr—he was a good drummer. Anyway, he got to know me. It was obvious he didn’t care if I was there. He had learned I wasn’t a threat.
I think he knew me because I didn’t get that scenario with other birds. They’re xenophobic, afraid of any new things. They see something new, they fly off. But if it’s something that’s repetitive that they can get used to, and understand and recognize, it’s not a threat. I wear basically the same gear, I have the same hat, I have my tripod. He knew me. I think that’s absolutely what happened with that bird.
So, I was able to approach very slowly without flushing him. He was making a stick and I thought he was going to this one hollow, but no, he flew right toward me. I didn’t realize I was right next to this other hollow and he flew so close to my 400 mm lens, his face basically filled the frame. It was so close. I was slowly moving the camera and he just didn’t care. He came almost above my head and then he started stripping a stick into nesting material down the hollow. He didn’t drum, unfortunately, but did everything right above me. I thought, “Wow, he’s truly accepted me and my presence in his territory.” That was a very special moment for me personally, in that I’d built a relationship with that bird. He just came to me.
Future Fables: Lessons from Other Animals
Curated by Zoë Sadokierski and Ceridwen Dovey of Animal Allegories.
Animal Allegories’ Future Fables: Lessons from Other Animals project. The off-kilter stories that make up the Future Fables collection are intended to open up new thresholds for considering how humans relate to the more-than-human species around us. These stories emerged alongside another project Animal Allegories is developing with the Australian Museum, titled “Survival Stories: Threatened Species and the Scientists Who Study Them.” Visit the Animal Allegories page for more information about Future Fables.
Humans and Nature Press Digital is honored to present Future Fables as an ongoing digital story gallery highlighting a variety of text, audio, video, and artwork capturing the power of human and nature encounters and connections. Stay tuned for more fables to come.
Image Credits
All images of Palm cockatoos by ©Christina Zdenek
Title Credit
The ‘Exercises in Minor Ornithology’ portion of the title was borrowed from Frank Steinheimer’s chapter ‘Six Exercises in Minor Ornithology’ in Anna-Sophie Springer and Étienne Turpin, eds., These Birds of Temptation (Verlag, 2021).
Notes
1. Robert Seatter, “The Cello and the Nightingale,” BBC News, March 25, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35861899.
2. Anecdotes and quotations from David Rothenberg are drawn from Anna-Sophie Springer and Étienne Turpin, eds., These Birds of Temptation (Verlag, 2021).
3. Hollis Taylor’s work can be found at the website https://www.hollistaylor.com/compositions.html.
4. The Bowerbird Collective produces cinematic concerts and multimedia performances that include birdsong, original compositions, and work from composers inspired by birdsong. They have adapted Tim Low’s book Where Song Began and Kenn Kaufma’s A Season in the Wind, and have collaborated with Indigenous Australian elders and culture bearers (https://bowerbirdcollective.org/works/).
5. Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster, “Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness,” Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695.
6. Anecdotes and quotations from Anna Tsing are drawn from Anna-Sophie Springer and Étienne Turpin, eds., These Birds of Temptation (Verlag, 2021), page 156.
7. Quotation edited from an interview with Rob Heinhson conducted by Zoë Sadokierski, in 2023.
Christina Zdenek’s website for the Palm Cockatoo Project, with links to published papers and a longer account of her field research processes, is available at https://cnzdenek.wixsite.com/cnzdenek/palm-cockatoos.
