Years ago I watched a film called My Life as a Turkey, an adaptation of the book Illumination in the Flatwoods by naturalist Joe Hutto. It’s a true story about how he raises a bunch of turkeys by allowing them to “imprint” on him as their mother.
Imprinting is an instinctual compulsion that some animals have to essentially assign the role of parent to the first thing they encounter. Hutto took a number of steps to facilitate the process, starting with singing to the baby turkeys while they were still in their eggs.
Until recently, that was as much as I knew about the incubation calling between a bird and its egg. But a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine has given me a lot more to think about.
Research suggests that an adult zebra finch feeling changes in the weather can communicate this information to her embryonic chicklets through song. The article is way more detailed, but in short the sounds the adult bird makes will actually modify the growth rate of the baby bird.
If the zebra finch senses that her baby will be born into a warmer-than-usual climate, it will sing a song that will have that baby born a bit smaller than otherwise. This smaller size allows for much more efficient thermoregulation which has the potential to improve the chick’s survival rate. But even more than that is evidence that those earliest songs will actually affect the bird throughout out its life, influencing, for example, how that bird will select its own nest once ready to do so.
Another form of incubation calling among fairywrens has the effect of teaching newly hatched chicks to differentiate themselves from another bird, the cuckoo. Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds to be hatched along with the host brood. The fairywren will sing her song to her nest of eggs and her babies will recognize that song and respond with the appropriate vocalizations once hatched. The cuckoo hatchlings are unable to do this and are soon eliminated from the nest.
I’ve seen humans do similar things. Hopeful mothers will boom Mozart into their bellies in order to activate hidden reserves of prenatal genius. At the risk of dashing the dreams of anticipatory stage-mothers everywhere, that’s probably a waste of time.
There is a practice among Muslims, however, of voicing the call to prayer into the ears of newborns. At the point of death, Muslims offer a funeral prayer, unique in that there is no call which precedes it, because, some scholars say, the call was already given at the time of birth.
It is as if we, like the fairywrens, zebra finches, and wild turkeys, have been commanded to share the one song that will define the lives of our offspring from cradle to grave.
You can find the rest of the article here.
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