Automobirds

Danny Heitman’s great little essay in the Monitor is an amusing read–but in concentrating on cars that sound like birds, he forgot to mention the birds that sound like internal combustion engines.

Cactus Wren is surely the best-known example.

Their chugging songs have been compared for at least 75 years to a car’s stubborn refusal to start on a cold morning, a comparison that always brings a smile to Arizona’s human snowbirds, happy to have exchanged the one type of droning whir for the other.

But there are others. Atlantic Puffins sound like a small engine revving dangerously high; the tropical forests of Guyana resound with a startlingly similar, and similarly startling, noise, the lekking calls of Capuchinbirds. Northern Pygmy-Owl can recall, with just a bit of imagination, the backing beeps of a gargabe truck.

And then of course there are the mimids. Northern Mockingbirds, once famous for their imitations of piano keys and squeaky gates, are now notorious in urban habitats around the continent for incorporating the whine of car alarms into their midnight songs.

I wonder what metaphors we’ll reach for when the age of the automobile comes to its inevitable end.