I usually I say cannot remember when or how I started making bird sounds. I was very young and, for some reason, my parents donÌt know. They think that possibly a carpenter, who remodeled our kitchen, taught me. He was a good whistler and could do something he called Ïwhistling double.Ó I think that I remember that he whistled with his lips, whereas I whistled with my tongue.
I remember thinking, when I was a child, that the bird songs started after a magical experience. I was no older than three when every kind of songbird imaginable came to the big mulberry tree in our back yard and ate from it. My dad had a good pair of binoculars from when he was a Party Chief of a seismograph crew and we used those binoculars and an encyclopedia to identify as many birds as we could. The whole family was very excited and involved with identifying these birds.
Eventually, the birds went away but they left our back porch polka-dotted with thousands of multi-pointed blue and white stars. And, they left me their songs. No one remembers this but me.