The Confluence of Birds, Language, and Mammals

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Hummingbirds are my favorite. I love their iridescent plumage, but I think I’d be a mockingbird were I born a feathered being.

I recently discovered quite by accident my ability to imitate bird calls. I was on my back porch sipping a strong cup of Irish black tea when a blue jay flew into a nearby pine tree and began tweeting. I listened and, when the tremulous trills began to sound desperate like the meows of a cat in distress, I responded. The bird went silent. When my call ended, it resumed. We fell into call and response until I got tired and moved back into the house. I kept hearing the bird, though, calling, pausing, hoping perhaps that I’d pick up the sound.

Later, I tested my vocalization skills when I heard mourning doves, Carolina wrens, red-bellied woodpeckers, robins, and tufted titmouse. To repeat certain patterns, consonants, vowels, and sounds is a big deal in this game of imitation, not to mention the wonders of the tongue—its manipulative ability to twist and make any shape you want, beat or knock on the roof of your mouth in order to produce the sound of a drum, car alarm, or an old German telephone ringtone. Add whistling, an art I’ve practiced since childhood, to produce varied sounds by drawing breath in, out, out, in… not only to match patterns but also tone, mood, and tempo.

Of all the birds I’ve courted, only the crows have detected fakery. Four of them are on the ground eating ants that could never make an anthill precisely because of the crows’ presence. How all the ants aren’t wiped out amazes me. The remnants persist, so do the crows. Every time a mound begins to sprout, the crows arrive. Both creatures are determined to survive, and they do. Perhaps not unlike us humans, although the difference is our incessant struggles are mostly against our own kind. So, it is possible that since we’re—people—of the same nature we can’t prevail over ourselves, we can only destroy each other. There’s no other environment to adapt to evolution-wise, that’s separate from the entanglements in which we are caught as human beings.

I attempt to lure the crows, kow-koww-kaw-k-ow-kauw-ko-ehw. They don’t even look up.

The bird that cracks my heart is a bright red cardinal. It is Saturday and I want to spend more time relaxing outside. I follow through the cardinal’s varied calls, excited by my ability to carry on. Warm bubbles flood my chest. This is fun! I’m whistling back and forth, creating a rhythm that feels natural and delightful. Eventually, I stop. The cardinal insists. What to do? I decide to indulge. The cardinal leaves the pine tree and swoops down. I stay on the porch. With my lips pointed and partly closed, I imitate him. He wobbles closer and I, too, advance in full disclosure.

The cardinal wavers; lifts his head in what appears to be a look of confusion. Whoit, whoit, whoit, I chirp. Pause. Then, the cardinal responds, Whoit, whoit, whoit, and stays. In that moment my heart flutters, and I wonder, Does he think we can make it? Even after I’ve exposed myself, he takes a few seconds to think, or whatever birds do that qualifies as thinking, and waits. If our positions were reversed, would I have the courage to do the same? What inspires in him such a leap of faith?

What had started as a joke took on serious importance and weighed on me.

I recalled a time in my childhood herding goats, sheep, and cattle in Kabale, Uganda. My primary school was ten minutes of good running from home, which I did the moment I heard the first sound of a gong. Usually, the school would assign a timekeeper—often a brilliant boy—to ring the bell hanging from a short eucalyptus tree in the school yard at 7.30 a.m. Most homesteads would hear the sharp bell and know it was time to assemble. After ten minutes there would be a second ring, quickly followed by roll call. By then I’d be joining my class line and wiping morning dew from my forehead. We lived in a valley that was always foggy in the mornings. Towards 10 a.m., the crispy chill in the air would lift and we’d see the hills then. My classroom had no windows, it was easy to see the sun and instantly feel warm. By 3 p.m., academic instruction would be over, save the games which I was allowed to skip so as to take care of the animals. I’d run home, take off my uniform, and put on comfortable caramel overalls.

During the holidays, I’d take the flock to graze as soon as I finished preparing breakfast around 8 a.m. My whole family would have been awake by 6.30 to milk the cows, harvest vegetables, plant new crops, wash dishes, and clean the yard. There was always something to do. I hated rising early but there was no way to escape. My father would come into the rooms of my siblings and I, pull back the covers and shout enthusiastically: Rise and Shine, three times! My father’s doctrine was, ‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a child healthy, wealthy, and wise.’

But what did I know about wealth, then? All I wanted was to sleep some more. I’d burrow deep into the covers after he’d gone, so there was a second coming when he’d speak with urgency and impatience about the cabbages that would drown in the coming rains if I did not go immediately to rescue them. The image of cabbage heads bobbing in stagnant waters was enough to put an end to sleep.

Looking after livestock had its own challenges but all in all was relaxing. Once I’d led the animals into the green elephant grass, which they loved, I’d read books, daydream, and sometimes nap without getting into trouble. Occasionally, I’d enjoy staring at the cultivated terraced hills surrounding the valley. Although my village sits at 6509 feet above sea level, high elevation does not give it mountain status, because the round slopes lack the sharp and pointed peaks characteristic of what we call mountains back home. Imagine my shock when I lived in Dakar and heard folks calling the two 344 feet Mamelles montagnes! Everything is relative. I’d climb the mounds propelled by an interest in the lighthouse at the top, which was critical to ships navigating the western tip of Africa.

Along the ridges of my hills in Kabale, I’d see little human figures going up or down carrying loads of food on their heads. In the scorching July and August heat, in December rains, I’d see these tireless workers and wonder what the worlds beyond our heights did for livelihood. We planted sorghum, maize, and wheat in the hills, then carrots, spinach, potatoes, peas, squash, and yams in the valleys. This had to do with the soils, controlling erosion, and what could be accessed quickly for a meal. Since the majority lived in the valley, it made sense to have most of the veggies growing near our homes. Besides, grass family crops took longer to mature and required less monitoring. Beans and bananas were our staple foods and grew anywhere we planted them. The latter would reproduce new suckers, ensuring the next generation of crop all year round. Other than pruning, transplanting, weeding, and keeping banana gardens neat, nothing else was required.

Diving into childhood memories made me realize my imitations on the porch in Asheville wasn’t the first time I was mimicking other creatures—while taking care of sheep one day, it began to rain; lightly at first, but quickly became a hailstorm. You may have heard that goats are stubborn but I’ll tell you: sheep won’t budge when you want them to move. They adamantly dig their hoofs into the ground, however much you push. On this particular day, I’d forgotten to carry a raincoat and I desperately wanted the sheep to run with me to a dry place. I nudged them with my stick but they kept their heads low. I was getting drenched and angry, so I cried like a sheep, Baaah! All the sheep turned around, looking for the bleating sheep, and I did it again from the depth of my lungs. They flocked towards me. I was young—7 or 8—shivering from the pelting rain, so I took off toward the roofed kraal bleating like my survival depended on it. As soon as I entered, all the sheep behind me crammed into the kraal too. I had stumbled on my first management solution. In the evening after I was relieved of my task, I wrote in my blue-cover notebook rule number 1. You cannot lead from behind. Lesson from sheep. Later, I tested the rule against goats and cattle, and achieved positive results. So I crossed sheep and replaced it with ‘livestock’. Whenever I had the animals mixed, instead of walking behind like I’d done previously, I now marched in front. I perfected the sounds so well that even my father mistook me for a cow, a goat, or a sheep on several occasions. When he finally asked why, I told him: Good leaders must speak the language of their followers. That was rule number 2. He chuckled and left me alone with my animals. From then on, grazing became a joyous experience. I always trusted the animals to follow, so on rare occasions when they hesitated, I knew there was something else they wanted. Some form of assurance like patting their backs or rubbing their ears. The language of touch goes deep with the animals, but I’d say with people as well. It’s where we converge—when we allow the soft animals of our bodies to love what they love, as Mary Oliver suggests in Wild Geese, we feed a primal need.

Years later, when I was pursuing a master’s degree in organizational psychology, I was presented with management scenarios that made me rummage through boxes of books for my blue notebook. When I found it, I was astounded by the parallel between animals and human behavior. Just think about leaders who have had a positive impact on our behavior. My luminaries include Barack Obama, Wangari Muta Maathai, Nelson Mandela, Miriam Makeba, Cheikh Anta Diop, Amílcar Cabral, Queen Nzingha Mbande, and Thomas Sankara. These leaders have in common admirable qualities, including the ability to speak the language of their people across the board.

During the 2020 presidential elections in the U.S., I became apprehensive when it occurred to me that we humans could have departed from our animal selves and thus forgotten what the animals still know.

When Joe Biden was finally declared president-elect, the weight of anxiety on my shoulders lifted. I exhaled, but then pondered how seventy-two million voters on the other side could choose Donald Trump, who does not uphold the ideals or founding principles of the developed Republic. His refusal to concede gracefully and to respect the good opinion of the majority—seventy-eight million voters—signified regression—a sign of weak leadership.There’s no way to comprehend how seventy-two million could endorse an authoritarian figure at variance with their own desires for freedom, without recognizing the wave of fascism that has ravaged and polarized the nation, thus producing schizophrenic individuals at odds with democratic principles.

How do we find common ground when we have millions seeking their own repression by identifying with behaviors that degrade and disempower them?

There is much work to do.

Watching vice president-elect Kamala Harris introduce Biden was deeply moving. After their victory speeches, my butterfly heart felt light and hopeful. I had not even realized that I had lived without hope for four years; that I needed comfort from a leader I could trust. Needless to say, even in our personal relationships, we choose companions who ‘speak our language’ in a literal or metaphorical sense. When this shared language changes, we either adapt to it or reconsider. More than anything else, perhaps, our response to inclusive or exclusive language demonstrates how the personal and political mirror each other.

Transferring knowledge from one experience into another, whether in the classroom or outside, in the public or private sphere, is what makes life and learning enjoyable for me. Something that’s both old and new evolves to create a thrilling experience. What appears incidental ends up making an indelible mark. What’s hidden is revealed in a series of accidents laughable and kind.

In my professional life, I’ve focused on tacit knowledge,competencies, and knowledge management in organizations. By nature, tacit knowledge is a knowing that is difficult to make explicit. In Latin, tacit means silent. You can write a manual on how to ride a bicycle or how to swim. But it won’t guarantee that if learners follow the instructions laid out, they’ll succeed. They’ll discover the tacit element embedded in the ride or swimming process, in the falls and near-drowning exploits. In fact, it’s the tacit aspect that transforms novices into experts. In other words—the interplay between the body and the bike, the body and water. How do we communicate that dynamism without running into complications?

When you have organizations whose source of success is tacit knowledge, you not only risk the organization’s continued existence (when the individuals who are repositories of that information leave), but you also encounter communication deficiencies among the employees. That’s where competencies to ably communicate or translate the tacit come in, and how to manage all the knowledge for efficiency, accessibility, and competitive edge.

This desire to express what we sometimes call the ineffable or incommunicable in the creative arts preoccupies me. It was with me both in my childhood and studies, and for some mysterious reason has remained with me in my adult life. I’ve come to conclude that I cannot accomplish it in writing without stepping outside myself, reaching into the world of birds and animals, or the fields of other artforms. Music, for instance, has an advantage because it can infuse words, sound, mood, texture, and silence into a three-minute song that makes us gasp, weep, or laugh. It can transport us across a broad spectrum of feelings in a matter of seconds, while at the same time evoking in us a cerebral reaction. It can improvise with effortless ease, transpose down an octave to create a vibration unheard of before. Other symphonies of music where sound and silence or pattern and texture rule in equal measure are composed by the human body in union with another. How do we transcribe effectively the bliss or ecstasy that’s embodied in lovemaking?

My open secret is to steal from music as much as possible in the name of shared poetics. But how to present silence—the most profound language—how to replace it with an interval that makes sense on the page eludes me. An occasional caesura, yes. Beyond that, incomprehensible.

The language of words is an animal. A puzzling, unfathomable beast. It ensnares us—traps us into thinking that we can master it. So we immerse ourselves in it, only to find it’s the other way around: it controls us. In spite of all that we know, we haven’t worked out how to say Hello. We don’t know how to put a democrat in the same bed with a republican without fucking each other to death. In a nation said to be built on the foundation of compromise, we no longer have any idea how to disagree amicably. We may use English but if one of us speaks disrespectfully of our bodies, ourselves, our rights, and freedoms as citizens, it’s a contest.

Other times, we are not prepared to listen to—much less hear—the answers to our questions. Recently, my neighbor met me on my way to the mailbox. She said, How are you? When I responded truthfully, which took a minute or so, her mouth opened, then dropped. She walked away faster than a cat on hot bricks. But she’d asked, right? The moral: don’t inquire into another’s state of being if you’re not ready for the answer.

As for me, I hear the cardinal. Getting closer, closer to my porch. Calling, calling, urging me to respond. I want to say, I love you. I’ll speak in my native language first—Ninkukunda. And then, translate it into the bird’s voice. After all, I am told that the philosophy of language must interact with translation to make the message meaningful and Intelligible to the receiver.

Having come this far, I think the cardinal will understand.