Luis F. Baptista; Ornithologist Mastered the Dialects of Birds
Luis Felipe Baptista, a widely respected ornithologist who could literally sing the languages and even dialects of birds from Alaska to Costa Rica, has died at the age of 58.
Colleagues at San Francisco’s California Academy of Science said the curator apparently suffered a heart attack while feeding birds in Golden Gate Park. He died Monday at his home in Sebastopol in Sonoma County.
The Hong Kong-born Portuguese American taught ornithology from 1973 to 1980 at Los Angeles’ Occidental College, where as curator he helped build the bird collection of its Moore Laboratory of Zoology. Since 1980, he had been curator and chairman of the San Francisco-based academy’s department of ornithology and mammalogy.
“Luis was a brilliant scientist who has made contributions that are fundamental to our understanding of bird communication and vocalization,” said the academy’s executive director, Patrick Kociolek.
Coauthor of a leading ornithology textbook and of a historical review of avian sound communication, Baptista was considered an international expert on bioacoustics, animal behavior and avian systematics. He wrote 127 scientific articles on his research into everything from the birds of his ancestral Macao, to parallels between birds learning to sing and human babies learning to talk, to whether Mozart took some of his melodies from a pet starling.
But Baptista reached the unschooled birder and curious observer as well as his fellow scientists.
“That’s a Japanese dove. They were brought here years ago and they escaped from someone’s aviary,” he whispered to visitors in 1975 as he set off through Occidental’s wooded campus, his parabolic reflector picking up the slightest bird sounds for his tape recorder.
Baptista’s equipment and his passion sometimes attracted an unwanted following, much to his amusement. At San Francisco’s Presidio, long before it became a national park, he was stopped by military police who figured that the strange parabolic reflector indicated he was a Communist spy. Wearing long hair when he did postdoctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Germany, he was again stopped by police who decided he was a nut when he said he was listening to birds.
From his early years in ornithology, Baptista began feeding his carefully gathered audiotapes through a spectrum analyzer, separating the frequencies of various bird songs for recording on an audio-spectograph. That instrument printed the bird song or speech patterns in a series of jagged lines much like the printout of an electrocardiogram.
That research led to his conclusion that no two species of birds have the same speech pattern and that individuals of the same species--say, his specialty, the white-crowned sparrow--speak or sing a different dialect according to whether they nest in Alaska or Argentina.
Leading a group of birders through his favored Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in 1981, Baptista himself warbled the nine white-crowned sparrow dialects that he had identified. He said he could differentiate among sparrows that lived in areas as close as Seattle and Coos Bay, Ore., or even Oakland and San Francisco.
“Some birds are bilingual,” he told a Times reporter in the group. “Some are trilingual.”
One species of bird might be influenced by another species, but could never progress beyond baby talk, he said. A bird learned to sing by imitating others, he added, just as human babies imitate their parents in learning to talk. He cited an experiment in which he placed a young white-crowned sparrow in a cage facing the cage of a strawberry finch from Thailand, explaining that the sparrow sang, if simply, like the finch rather than like a sparrow.
Only last month, Baptista, working with Robin Keister of UC Davis, presented a paper at a meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science on the interaction of bird song and the music created by human beings.
“As composers,” he said, “birds often use the same rhythmic variations, pitch relationships, permutations and combinations of notes as found in music so that some bird songs resemble musical compositions. And they often vary themes in much the same way as humans.”
Some bird song uses the eight-note scale of Western music, he said, and others use a five-note scale common in Chinese music.
Baptista said his research also showed that humans, in turn--indigenous people and famous composers alike--incorporate bird sounds into their music. He cited the Koyukon people in Alaska using the song of the loon, a Costa Rica tribe copying the song of the riverside wren in its flute music, Mozart borrowing the dissonant sounds of his pet starling, and Beethoven adapting the song of a blackbird.
Only a week before his death, Baptista chaired a symposium in Portugal on bioacoustics as a tool in conservation studies.
Baptista immigrated to Northern California as a teenager and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of San Francisco in ornithology and in the study of the evolution of human and animal behavior. His doctorate was from UC Berkeley.
He served on the board of the Cooper Ornithological Society and was an American representative to the International Ornithological Council.
Survivors include his mother, Thelma; his daughter, Laura; two brothers, Gaspar and Antonio; and his partner, Helen Horn.
A memorial service is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. June 24, at the Star of the Sea Church, 4420 Geary Blvd., San Francisco.
Contributions may be made either to the Island Endemics Institute, P.O. Box 2175, Sebastopol, CA 95472, or to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA 94118.
