FACULT Y
Photo by Skyler Ewing on Pexels
Swan Song
for Birdsong Retiring Faculty: Franz Goller
W
hy do birds sing? This is an age-old question, and answers have been proposed by everyone from Artistotle and Aristophanes to David Attenborough and the late poet Maya Angelo, but just as interesting as the “why do birds sing?” is the “how do they do it?” Dr. Franz Goller, who is retiring from the School of Biological Sciences after twentythree years, has made significant advances to our understanding of how birds sing. His work has elucidated the mechanisms of neuromuscular coordination of the various systems involved in birdsong production, systems that are analogous in interesting ways to human speech. Walking into Franz’s lab in 2002, I was, of course, first struck by the musicality of the space. There were scarlet-beaked zebra finches hopping on and off their perches. Starlings, robins, white-crowned sparrows, and yellow-headed blackbirds, and around all of these birds were curious scientists trying to listen in (so to speak) for a deeper understanding of how these birds produced sounds. Franz was asking questions such as: How do birds learn to sing? Why do different species 4
By Sylvia Torti
generate such different ranges of sound features? What aspects of song are difficult to produce and make individual birds into vocal athletes? Do individual birds’ individualistic skill sets and weaknesses appear in their song performance? And perhaps most startling, Why do birds silently sing in their dreams? Pursuit of these questions led Franz frequently from his lab and into the outdoors. He established collaborative friendships with colleagues in the US, Europe, and South America and travelled in pursuit of birds that allowed him to address his ever increasing number of questions. What I found so rare was that Franz opened his lab, and shared his love of birds, birdsong, and scientific exploration (as well as good coffee) not only with students, budding scientists, and colleagues, but also artists and writers. I was a fortunate recipient of his openness and patience, which resulted in my novel Cages (Schaffner Press 2017), a fictional story that takes place largely inside a birdsong laboratory. Franz also collaborated with Krista Caballero and Frank Ekeberg (a visual artist and sound artist, respectively) on their Birding the Future series entitled Lab Birds (https://www.birdingthefuture.net/lab). This willingness to engage other disciplines and to take the time to enter into protracted, often difficult conversations around
