The pleasure of Birdsong

I can hear birdsong this morning. As well as the daily freeway traffic growing louder. Yesterday, I read an article in New Scientist about the roots of music. It is thought that birds sing for pleasure. They have the same dopamine chemicals as us, at work deep in the primitive parts of their brain to release pleasurable feelings when they are singing. It is also thought that male birds feel more pleasure when singing to a girl bird. This is very poetic. But in typical scientific fashion, the poetry of nature is reduced and pared away until the only meaning it has left is a mechanical function.

I will admit, it disheartens me to think that the pleasure of birdsong, both for them and me, at its core is nothing more than a hardwired biological drive. Just a mechanism of survival. If that is the final meaning for everything, then all art and poetry, all of life, and sadly, even the pleasure of birdsong, are dead, mechanical things.

And there may be nothing in the world sadder than that.