This short recording is amazing too --
"Superb Lyrebird, "flute" territorial Song."
Sydney Curtis, who recorded it, describes,
I was told that in the 1920s, a lyrebird chick was taken from the nest and raised in a farmer's fowl-yard. It was a male, and young male lyrebirds learn to sing by copying mature males. There were no lyrebirds that this one could hear, so he sang what he could hear: the farmer's son practising his flute. The bird learnt to sing with a flute quality, and he sang fragments of the Keel Row, the Mosquito's Dance and the diatonic scale.
Eventually, the bird was released back into the area from which he had been taken, and ...the flute sounds became the territorial song of the local population.
That's the story, as it was told to me, and when I went there to record the birds in 1978, the local National Park Ranger (who had ferreted out the story) showed me the site of the farm house where the bird was raised. By then the house had been removed, but the stumps on which it stood were still there.
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1 comment:
Wow . . . amazing!! That shows how important community is, doesn't it? We often sing the song that we hear from others . . . shows how much we need Christian friends!
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