It pleases me beyond belief that one of the most venerable of American bell manufacturers is called — get this — Verdin.
The company is not named for the penduline tit of the deserts, alas, but the coincidence got me thinking about a question that has bothered me for years — for decades, in fact.
What does it mean to say that a bird’s sounds are “bell-like”?
Compare the hollow clonking of a bearded bellbird
with the shirring trill of a Barrow’s goldeneye‘s wings
or the mock-ferocious tooting of a northern pygmy-owl.
Or even the staccato ticking of an excited verdin: all those sounds and many more are regularly described as “bell-like.”
They all are, I suppose, but the bells to which they are likened are all different ones. We have only the one word in English, unfortunately, “bell,” to describe the variety of noisemakers those birds’ sounds evoke, from the wooden thonk of the bellbird to the silvery jingle bell whistle of the goldeneye. Some other languages are better off here. Compare the German “Glockenvogel,” for example, for the bellbird with “Schellente” for the seaduck: the first rings like a church bell, the second sussurates in flight like distant sleigh bells.
This I can understand. And if we expand our definition of the bell just a little ways to include the triangle — that musical instrument so beloved of elementary school teachers and put to such good and witty use by Liszt — then it makes sense to me, too, to call the chips of verdins and black-throated sparrows “bell-like.”
