Squirrels Understand ‘Bird-ese,’ and Birds Understand ‘Squirrel-ese.’

Dr. Greene, 57, developed his fascination with birds and sound early on, growing up around Montreal as a “total nature nerd,” he said. As a young boy, he listened to classical, jazz and Renaissance music, and then played them. He recalled being “a harpsichord-playing, hockey thug, bird nerd.”

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As a teenager, he met Peter and Rosemary Grant, then at McGill University in Montreal, who would gain fame for their study of Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos Islands. They offered him a yearlong job as a field assistant. He dropped out of high school and never returned.

That experience, however, helped him gain admission to Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. There he spent much time in Renaissance consorts playing obscure instruments like the crumhorn — “which sounds like a pig being slaughtered,” he said — before attending Princeton for his doctorate in ecology, evolution and behavior.

“What I’m doing now is really a natural marriage of those sorts of interests,” Dr. Greene said of his interest in animal communication. “It’s nature’s music, in a way.”

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