by joe nickell  

Professor Erick Greene has spent years recording the subtleties of a songbird’s serenade. In his office at the University of Montana recently he listens to the distinct spectrograms of five different lazuli buntings. Michael Gallacher

In a brushy crease on the face of Mount Sentinel, the quietude of an early summer morning is pierced by a quick, high-pitched flourish of sound. To most human ears, if the racket registers at all, it evokes a single word: bird. To people who come listening for such things, those three seconds of warbled phrases evoke two words: lazuli bunting.

A small, thick-billed songbird with a head the color of a clear Montana sky over a bib of rust, the male lazuli bunting fills the foothills and ravines of mounts Sentinel and Jumbo with song during the summer months. He comes here from his wintering grounds in western Mexico to claim a small parcel of prime real estate, find a mate and sire a brood, as he and his ancestors have done since long before the sounds of hammers, cars and the occasional Rolling Stones concert began to fill the valley below.

Erick Greene has spent plenty of time in the company of these blue-headed songbirds. A biologist and professor at the University of Montana, Greene has made the western faces of Sentinel and Jumbo his own personal research laboratory.

But that’s not exactly how he sees it. To him, these hillsides are Missoula’s oldest jazz clubs.

“Jazz is about some old guy playing a tune, a young guy comes along and learns the riffs but then does it his own way,” says Greene. “It turns out, that’s exactly how these birds are learning their songs. They’re listening to what’s out there, imitating what they hear, and then putting those riffs together in uniquely individual ways.”

A slender, square-jawed man who stands at his desk and sometimes sleeps on a cot in his office, Greene speaks with the kind of animated gestures and crescendos of staccato chatter that mark him as a scientist more comfortable birding in the field than resting in the roost.

Yet in his office on the second floor of UM’s Health Sciences Building, Greene has lit upon some discoveries that transform our scientific understanding of birdsong, while intuiting tantalizing insights into the process by which we humans learn and become individuals.

If nothing else, his research completely wrecks any assertion that African-American musicians of the early 20th century invented anything fundamentally new when they began improvising around familiar tunes and calling it jazz.

A lazuli bunting, captured by Greene on Mount Jumbo in the mid-1990s, is delicately removed from the netting before being banded and released. Kurt Wilson

Actually, Greene could have told you that last part long before he even decided to become a bird scientist. As a child, Greene’s first deep interest was music. It all began with an album that his mother gave him one Christmas, of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 1 and Italian Concerto, performed by the famed pianist Glenn Gould.

Greene knew nothing of Bach nor Gould. But to humor his mother, he put the album on for a spin.

“From the first few seconds, I was utterly transfixed,” recalls Greene. “I had no idea there were such sounds out there. It was weird and totally transformative. I must have listened to that record 500 times. I was lost, I was hooked.”

The young boy quickly began to devour the music of Bach and his Baroque predecessors. As he began to learn about the music that drove his passions, he discovered that an integral part of the performance technique of the period was improvisation.

“A lot of the Baroque and Rennaisance music is actually very skeletal on paper,” he says. “Everything else you hear – the little flourishes and elaborations around the melody – is improvisation. So it’s jazz, just not by that name.”

Greene himself began to play the harpsichord and organ, and even contemplated a career as a performer. Yet the songs of the wild proved a greater draw.

“I did a lot of classical music but also was passionate about the outdoors and animals and communication and behavior,” he says. “So it ultimately was a natural marriage of my interests to go into this type of science.”

“I’ve always been fascinated in how we use sound in different ways,” he continues. “That’s how I started these studies, asking questions about the function of different kinds of calls and communication.”

Greene already knew that individual mature male lazuli buntings only sang one song over the course of their entire adulthood. He also knew that those songs were different from bird to bird.

“Each mature male has an acoustic fingerprint – a bar code, so to speak,” he says. “We call that his ‘crystallized song.’ They keep them for life.”

What wasn’t known was how the birds developed and differentiated those crystallized songs. So in 1992, Greene and a team of researchers began capturing male lazuli buntings on mounts Jumbo and Sentinel. Each bird was fitted with an individually color-coded leg band – “a little piece of unique bling,” Greene jokes – and then released.

At the same time, the team began recording and cataloging the calls of individual birds. Employing spectrogram readings, Greene developed a transcription system that visually showed the time and pitch patterns of the birds’ songs, much like sheet music.

What he found was that the songs of mature birds on Missoula’s signature hillsides were made up of utterances borrowed and recombined from other birds in the immediate area.

What’s more, he was able to observe that borrowing process in action with the yearling birds who were making their first return trip to the area.

“When the yearlings come in, they’re sexually mature, but they don’t have a song to carve out a chunk of real estate and attract the babes,” he explains. “They figure out real fast, you have to have a song or you’re not a player.”

Pulling up a slide on his computer, Greene shows the spectrogram for one yearling bird’s recorded song, along with the spectrograms for the songs of six other birds.

“Here’s the most incredible example of song-borrowing I know of,” he says. “Here’s a guy with six different syllable-types in his song. When we ask where he got those, he borrowed each one from a separate song tutor – six different males who were spread out on the mountain from over past the ‘M’ to down above the golf course to halfway up the mountain.

“So he was wandering all over the bottom half of Sentinel, listening to a lot of males, and he compiled all this acoustic information in his noggin with a high degree of fidelity and then was able to repeat them in a combination that was his own.”

It wasn’t just the individual sounds, or “syllables,” that the bird borrowed.

“There’s some grammatical rules here that you can plainly see when you map it all out,” says Greene. “The first syllable is the first from this older male. The second is from this other bird’s second syllable. With the rest, it’s not exactly a one-to-one correspondence – some of the birds have more or fewer syllables in their songs, but there’s no crossing lines where he has moved a syllable earlier or later than it appeared in his tutor’s song.

“So it’s evident that they do pay attention to syntax and some sort of bunting grammar.”
Granted, that’s not exactly pure improvisation, in the way many of us think of improvisation.

“If he was a university student, he’d get kicked out of school so fast for plagiarism,” says Greene.

But then again, what is true improvisation or originality? Jazz wasn’t the first music to integrate improvisation into its basic structure. Even Bach, the great composer, borrowed music from himself and others. This very sentence on the page may have never been written before, yet it is comprised of individual elements that have been uttered millions upon millions of times before. (The exact phrase, “millions upon millions,” produces more than 6.8 million hits on Google.)

Examined another way, how is it that a jazz aficionado can discern whether an old recorded saxophone solo is that of Coleman Hawkins or the Bird himself, Charlie Parker? How can you recognize the voice of a friend on the other end of a crackling telephone connection, without her mentioning her name?

Individuality and originality, it would seem, are intrinsically linked not only to creativity, but also to those things that never change: the unique set of overtones produced by our vocal cords as we sing or speak; the whorls on our fingertips; and, importantly, the brushy hillsides or bustling streets where we establish and expand our perspectives on the world.

“We inherit what we inherit, we imprint on what we experience, and then we rebel,” says Greene. “That’s what being a teenager is all about; it’s what being a yearling lazuli bunting is all about. We have the same kind of neural pathways and processes as birds do in terms of infants learning to speak – it’s the same wiring diagram in the brain. It’s an ancient, conserved blueprint. It’s what you share with the dinosaurs.”

“And yet that’s also where innovation comes from,” he continues. “That’s what’s cool about culture and art: People are borrowing stuff and putting their own fresh twist on it. Seeing those connections is what’s really exciting to me.”

Joe Nickell covers arts and entertainment for the Missoulian. He can be reached at  (406) 523-5358 or by email at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

photo 1: Professor Erick Greene has spent years recording the subtleties of a songbird’s serenade. In his office at the University of Montana recently he listens to the distinct spectrograms of five different lazuli buntings. Michael Gallacher

photo 2: A lazuli bunting, captured by Greene on Mount Jumbo in the mid-1990s, is delicately removed from the netting before being banded and released.
Kurt Wilson

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