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New Birdsong

The times are strange and the light at the end of the tunnel feel far. Ran into this NatGeo article that is about things way less stressful - the changing song of a sparrow. There are people who spend their time studying birdsong - I have to imagine, their lives have been relatively less impacted by the pandemic. Instead of worrying about the spread of a virus around the world. these folks are lucky enough to ponder the reasons for why a new birdsong went viral

New variations of songs crop up constantly, but the vast majority of these aren’t picked up by other birds.

“For some reason, some birds just went deviant,” says Podos, describing the advent of the new doublet-ending song. “You figure it would have just died on the vine, but somehow other birds must have found it interesting.”

Otter and his team didn’t find that birds singing new doublet-ending songs were better at wooing mates or defending territories, so it doesn’t appear to be advantageous or deleterious. This just adds to the mystery of the song’s virality.

The world needs such specialists to do their thing so there are tiny oases of sanity where others could dip into sometimes. Reminded of these lines from the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance "The range of human knowledge today is so great that we are all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them always has to forego closeness with the people around him"

There is indeed a chasm between academicians who study of the viral birdsong and say brokers selling insurance to extreme sports enthusiasts is not one can be crossed naturally. Thanks to modern technology, it is possible to move more between specialties than had been possible when Prising wrote his book. That is not to say that such movement does not come at the cost of closeness to people. 

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