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Scientific research has revealed that throughout the living world, communication is just as important as it is to human beings. Countless living things lack the capacity for human speech, yet they employ entirely different methods in order to communicate with each other - and even with other species. Some of the most dramatic examples of this is displayed by birds.

All forms of life on Earth have been created with miraculous properties and astonishing abilities. The examination of just one single species is enough to reveal hundreds of proofs of Allah’s magnificent creation.

In one verse of the Qur’an, Allah reveals that:

There is no creature crawling on the earth or flying creature, flying on its wings, who are not communities just like yourselves - We have not omitted anything from the Book - then they will be gathered to their Lord. (Qur’an, 6: 38)

The birds to which this verse draws our attention notice are one of the living communities that we need to examine and reflect upon.

There are roughly some 10,000 species of bird in the world, each of which possesses its own miraculous features. Wherever you may live, you can see a great number of these feathered creatures and can observe different and extraordinary properties in each and every one. With their attractive appearances, flawless flight mechanisms, expertise on the routes and timing of migrations, ability to build nests and altruistic behavior toward their young and to one another, birds possess countless proofs of the fact of creation. Their ability to communicate is another of these.

Birds' Sense of Hearing

For birds to display their talents in communicating by sound, song - and in the case of some birds, words - they require excellent hearing. At critical times in their lives, their sense of hearing becomes particularly Important. Experiments have shown that in orderfor birds to learn the distinctive song of their own species, they need an auditory feedback system. Thanks to this system, young birds learn to compare the sounds they produce themselves with the patterns of a song they have memorized. If they were deaf, It wouldn't normally be possible for them to sing recognizable songs.

Birds' ears are well equipped for hearing, but they hear in a different way from us. For them to recognize a tune, they have to hear it in always the same octave (a series of seven notes), whereas we humans can recognize a tune even if we hear it in a different octave. Birds cannot, but can instead recognize timbre - a fundamental note combined with harmonies. The ability to recognize timbre and harmonic variations lets birds hear and reply to many diverse sounds, and sometimes even reproducethem.

Birds can also hear shorter notes than we can. Humans process sounds in bytes in about 1/20th of a second, whereas birds can distinguish these sounds in 1/200th of a second. This means that birds are superior at differentiating sounds that arrive in very rapid succession. In other words, a bird's capacity to perceive sound is approximately ten times greater than ours; and in every note heard by a human, it can hear ten. Moreover, some birds are also able to hear lower-frequency sounds than we are. Their hearing sensitivity is so finely tuned that they can even tell the difference between pieces by such famous composers as Bach and Stravinsky.