Episode Details

The idea of the "swan song" recurs from Aesop to Ovid to Plato to Tennyson. Ovid described it, "There, she poured out her words of grief, tearfully, in faint tones, in harmony with sadness, just as the swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song." But it's based on a sweet fallacy – that a swan sings only when it nears death. And calling the sounds that a swan makes a "song" might be a bit off, too!

More info and transcript at BirdNote.org. 

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