Trill Performance

Melissa Range

Spectrogram, measure it—
the stretch of a note
from a house wren’s throat.

Bubble, roll, flourish, frill—
pull apart each syllable.
Chart the trill,

wring
information out of song.
To gauge why wrens sing

jumbled and fast and long,
graph the range of tune in orange, 
yellow, pink. Each time, the song

will change. Spectrogram,
treasure it—unstable variable, wren’s
whim, or stratagem.

The Science

A spectrogram is an instrument that can depict sound visually, which makes it an especially helpful tool for analyzing birdsong. In this poem, I riff on an article which discusses using a spectrogram to measure male house wrens’ “trill performance”: the speed and variety of repeating syllables and the range of pitches in their songs. (Italicized language in my poem is adapted from this article.) While the spectrogram can measure a wren’s song down to the millisecond, scientists nonetheless are not quite sure why wrens sing the way they do—their loud, fast, and complex songs are a mystery only the wrens themselves understand.

The Poet

Melissa Range is the author of Printer’s Fist, winner of the 2025 Vanderbilt Literary Prize (Vanderbilt University Press, 2026), as well as Scriptorium (Beacon Press, 2016) and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. Fascinated by the intelligence, independence, and resilience of birds, she is at work on a new poetry collection about birds, privacy, surveillance, and technology.

Next poem: when yellow-headed blackbirds fell from the sky by Cindy Botha