In spring comes bird song again. Well, really, all winter the blue jays never stopped scolding and the chickadees never stopped saying their own names. But the whistle and chatter get full in the woods again, since the robins are poking around in the grass and the geese are passing through.

The chickadees sing a song in spring and summer that we rarely hear in winter at our house, or at least don’t notice. It’s two notes, dotted quarter-notes if I’m not mistaken, descending a half-step. The rhythm and interval are always the same. The pitch is steady in any given rendition, though different keys are used. With my guitar tuned by electronic device to 440, I matched one bird’s A and A flat, with a slight bend upward in the flat, while another bird answered a half-step lower – A flat to G. Another day, one bird sang E and E flat.

I start noticing this two-tone tune around early April. It’s a spring song. Or anyway, I give it that name the same way I give names to the pitches of the notes. The chickadees have no thought of pitch or interval, as far as anybody knows. But on the other hand, it’s hard to avoid the idea that they sing.

Mozart had a starling. He apparently loved it so much that when it died, he held a funeral service and recited a poem he wrote for it. As the story goes, one reason Mozart loved the bird was because it had learned to whistle the theme of the last movement of his piano concerto in G major K 453. Life imitates art, apparently.

Birds learn their tunes from other birds, and some, like starlings, imitate not only other starlings but all kinds of sounds. One study revealed there’s no rhyme or reason, as it were, to what a starling will mimic – it can be a human household’s often-repeated phrase, or sniffing sounds with words heard just once. One starling who was having his foot treated for an infection kept shouting very clearly, “I have a question!” Another who got his head tangled up in string hollered over and over, “Basic research!”

More often, starlings put quirky variations into what they hear, no more “meaningful” than shouting “basic research,” but clearly intentional. Mozart’s starling modified the melody of the concerto theme by hitting G sharp in place of Mozart’s G natural. Mozart loved this kind of playfulness. There’s a theory that the oddities of his “Musical Joke,” which was composed around the time he kept the starling, are adapted from the whistlings of the bird. So the bird’s and composer’s voices crossed, and art imitated life.

The chickadees who inhabit the woods around my house are less inventive, but they’ve persisted in the woods so long the same spring song is handed down year to year from elders to youngsters who learn it verbatim.

Verb-atim? I have a question! Are they actually saying meaningful things?

Not in our usual understanding of “meaningful.” Their whistles are pretty surely not words. But neither is Mozart’s concerto, which nonetheless feels meaningful. Music is the tone of meaning without the words. The birds appear to grasp this, somehow.

To them, the experience is the meaning. Never again will bird song be the same.

Information from “Mozart’s Starling” at www.starlingtalk.com/mozart1.htm.