Birdsong is exemplary in its quotidian familiarity, and yet enigmatic almost to the point of obscurity, the heroic efforts of the ornithologists notwithstanding (Stap).⁠ Even the term “birdsong” is debatable, if by this we make the claim that nonhuman animals produce music, which is a canonical example of question begging. Naturalists still disagree even on why birds sing (Araya-Salas; Higgins 31-32; Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing; Taylor, Is Birdsong Music?), and they might be placed on a spectrum from the behaviorists and evolutionary biologists, who insist that the sounds birds make are no more than a territorial warning or a sexual invitation, to those who see or hear something else, some excessive exuberance, either approximately or exactly equivalent to our human act of singing for pleasure. Birdsong is, for such aficionados, perhaps even an analogy to art itself (Okanoya; Zeigler; Marler).⁠ They rightly lean on the venerable authority of Darwin here. For him, it is the voices of the passeriformes, the perching or singing birds, that explain nothing less than the evolution of the aesthetic. But they also follow the lead of Kant and his fulsome appreciation of the “free beauties of nature,” “pulchritudo vaga”: “things of nature into which no human has placed any meaning whatsoever” (cf. Figal 54, 55).⁠ This natural beauty might even be moresublime than human art, since “a bird’s song, which we can reduce to no musical rule, seems to have more freedom in it, and thus to offer more for taste, than the human voice singing in accordance with all the rules that the art of music prescribes” (Kant 73-74). Hegel, in his appreciation of the “blithe self-enjoyment” of the birds, sounds the same note, exactly: “voice is not a mere declaration of a need, no mere cry; on the contrary, bird-song is the disinterested utterance whose ultimate determination is the immediate enjoyment of self” (Philosophy of Nature 409).⁠