Popular Electronics April 1964, V20 N5           Previous     Index     Next

Their blankets were spread on the grassy bank of a small creek running near the little-traveled road. Lunch was over, and Jodi was replacing the empty dishes-there was nothing else left to replace! -in the hamper while Carl and Jerry lolled contentedly on the grass and admired the girls in their tailored shorts and pretty blouses.

"There now," Jodi said in her rich southern drawl. "You all can put the basket back in the car and then tote these blankets over there into the sun so that Thelma and I can be working on our sun tan while we play bridge." The boys obeyed, and the four of them had just settled down in the warm, relaxing sunshine when a lonely crow perched on a dead limb atop a nearby oak let out a disapproving "Caw!" Carl and Jerry exchanged a look and then ran with one accord to the car and began unloading a transistorized tape recorder and a parabolic reflector mounted on a collapsing stand.

While the girls watched in wordless amazement, Jerry hurriedly pointed the open face of the dish at the crow and connected the shielded lead from a small microphone mounted at the focal point of the parabolic surface to the recorder. At this point the crow left his perch and went flapping soundlessly away over the treetops.

"Let's leave things set up," Carl suggested. "Maybe he'll come back."

"What on earth are you trying to do?" Thelma wanted to know.

"It's kind of a long story," Jerry replied, sitting back down on the blanket. "You probably know that scientists have recently taken a renewed interest in trying to communicate with non-human creatures. I say 'renewed' because man has always wanted to talk to animals and birds, but up until now no one has had much luck. Oh it's true we've taught parrots and mynah birds to imitate speech, but imitation is not communication -not unless you know what the sounds really mean.

"Anyway, it seems that trying to teach birds to talk human language is going at things the wrong way. A superior intelligence should always try to speak the language of an inferior intelligence. We do this without thinking about it by talking 'baby-talk' to children just learning to speak, or by using pidgin-English for communication with the natives of some countries. The trouble in trying to learn the language of an animal or a bird has been that there was no way of 'freezing' the strange, fleeting sounds they make so they could be studied in detail and related to observed behavior patterns. It looks like electronics may now give us a way to do this."

"Yeah," Carl chimed in. "Just the other day I saw a Sperry advertisement that showed a man holding a microphone in front of a happy-Iooking dolphin. The mike was connected to a tiny computer developed by Sperry with a 'brain cell' of minute optic fibers. This SCEPTRON(tm) Pattern Recognizer can memorize, distinguish between, and react to different sights and sounds. It's not too far out to hope that before long such a device may be able to translate the language of the dolphin, a very smart mammal, into human terms and vice versa. We know for certain that dolphins do talk to one another. Sonar operators hear them doing it all the time."

"An interesting thing is that chickens speak a kind of Esperanto, or universal language," Carl added. " A Russian Orloff rooster or an Italian Leghorn hen will instantly recognize and react to the danger call of a New Hampshire Red. And what do you suppose a hen is saying when she starts cackling after laying an egg?"

"'Ouch!' " Thelma guessed.

"She's probably boasting, 'Wil1 you all just come and look what I've done?' " Jodi suggested.

"Nope, you're both wrong. After having been in seclusion while laying the egg, she wants to rejoin the flock; so she's saying, 'Hey, where is everybody?'"

"This story reminded us that we did have a crude sound pattern recognizer in our tape recorder," Jerry continued. "It can remember and reproduce any sound pattern it hears. Furthermore, by keeping careful notes on what a bird or animal was doing when it uttered the recorded sounds, we might be able to correlate the two and possibly arrive at a meaning for the sound. Since Dr. Baeumer seems to have the chicken chatter pretty well sewed up, we decided to concentrate on crows."

"As any farmer will tell you, there's no smarter bird flying," Carl said. "Crows are very wary, so we rigged up the parabolic reflector to concentrate the sounds on the mike and enable us to make good recordings of crow calls from a distance. It works, too. For the past two or three months we've been sneaking around out here in our spare time making crow recordings. A twelve-year-old boy who lives in that farmhouse down the road has been tagging after us, and we've left the recorder with Steve a couple of times to see if he could tape some calls on his own."

"What's the point in going to all this trouble to talk to other creatures?" Jodi asked thoughtfully. "Surely we know everything they know."

"There's where you're wrong," Carl said promptly. "Dolphins could tell us a lot about secrets of the sea. And if we could talk to them, think how they could help in locating wrecks, in pinpointing storms, in saving lives when a plane is down at sea, or even in penetrating enemy mine fields and submarine nets in time of war."

"Actually we already have a good example of how being able to understand and imitate bird language can be a big help," Jerry interrupted. "Birds can be a real menace to modern high-speed jets. They can easily wreck a plane if they're sucked into the engines on take-off or landing. Zoologist Johann D. F. Hardenberg of the Dutch ministry of agriculture was asked to help with this problem, and he tried playing recordings of American gulls to frighten off Dutch herring gulls infesting the Leeuwarden military air base. This didn't work. Unlike chickens, gulls seem to have their own dialects, and the Dutch gulls didn't dig the American birds. But when Dutch gull distress calls were played over loudspeakers mounted along the runways, they frightened the herring gulls away. Dr. Hardenberg says nearly all birds are frightened away by their own distress calls."

"How do you like these guys?" Thelma asked poutingly. "We get this sumptuous lunch together, get all dressed up, and what happens? They dash off and try to communicate with an old crow! It's downright humiliating to a girl."

"Cheer up, Thelma," Jerry laughed. "You communicate better than a whole flock of crows. If you don't believe it, just listen to this."

Retrieving a roll of tape from the car, Jerry brought the recorder over to the blanket, placed the reel on the machine, and turned up the volume.

A great cacophony of raucous cawing poured from the speaker.

"You're wrong," Thelma shouted, leaping to her feet and starting to twist wildly. "They're having a hootenanny! Don't you hear that beat?"

When they stopped laughing, Jerry put away his notebook and announced: "I don't know what this next recording is. Steve, that kid we were telling you about, wasn't home when we picked up the recorder; but his dad said he had got some kind of recording and would tell us about it later."

The previous recording had been loud, but what came from the speaker now put it to shame. The voices of several different birds could be heard screaming with obvious anger and hatred, and there was another sound of beating, flapping wings. And then suddenly the recording came alive--or so it seemed. Out of nowhere came dozens of screeching, dive-bombing crows making precisely the same sounds heard on the tape recorder. Jodi and Thelma started to scream as they felt the bird claws touching their hair and the wings beating against their faces.

Carl and Jerry grabbed up the blankets and beat off the attacking birds while all four ran toward the car. Once inside, they rolled up the windows and were safe from the crows who were still flying back and forth overhead and uttering warlike cries.

"Whew! Wasn't that something!" Carl exclaimed.

"It certainly was," Jodi answered. "I feel exactly as though I'm in the middle of one of those horror movies in which birds suddenly turn against people. What's the matter with those crazy crows?"

"It must be something about that recording Steve made," Jerry mused; "and we're going to drive to his place right now and see where he got it."

"I reckon I know why it happened," he admitted. "I lugged that recorder all around without finding any crows to record. Then I spotted this crow's nest in the top of an old pine. I decided to climb up and see if maybe I could get a recording of young crows in their nest, so I fastened the recorder to my belt and shinnied up the pine. Just as I was getting close to the nest and had turned on the recorder, a whole bunch of them durned crows attacked me. Man, I mean they were all over me, cawing, pecking, scratching, and hitting me with their wings. I tumbled out of that old pine and beat it, but I managed to get the whole thing on the tape."

"Now it makes sense," Jerry observed. "What we have on that recording in crow language is probably a combination of 'Stop, thief!' and that old carnival rallying call of 'Hey Rube!' When the birds heard this coming from the recorder, they reacted just as they did when they discovered Steve threatening their nest."

"Well," Jodi drawled, "picnicking with you two fellows may not be very quiet and restful, but you certainly can't call it dull."

"You better believe it," Thelma piped up as she anxiously examined a couple of tiny claw scratches with the aid of the sun visor mirror. "I'd say this picnic was for the birds!"

But the grin she flashed at the boys revealed that she didn't really mean what she said. -30-

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