The drum rolls of great spotted
woodpeckers may be used to identify individuals, according to a study published
February 7, 2018 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Michal Budka
from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland, and colleagues.
Many birds make individually-specific
calls or songs that allow them to be recognized by others of the same species;
for example, female zebra finches can identify their mates, and king penguin
chicks can identify find their parents out of the several thousand birds in a
colony. In addition, some birds make other kinds of sounds that signal their
sex; for example, oriental white storks clatter their mandibles together in a
sex-specific fashion, and male common snipes make a drumming sound with their
tail feathers.
Woodpeckers drum with their
bills, pecking rapidly and repetitively to produce a series of drum rolls. Both
male and female woodpeckers use drumming to attract mates and deter rivals.
Budka and colleagues investigated the role of drumming in the great
spotted woodpecker(Dendrocopos major), the most common
woodpecker species in the Western Palearctic. The researchers recorded drumming
of 41 great spotted woodpeckers (26 males, nine females, and six unsexed
individuals), and compared the length of intervals between strokes as well as
the number of strokes within a drumming roll.
The researchers found that the
intervals between strokes were shorter in males than in females. But they
concluded that while temporal patterns of the woodpeckers' drumming may provide
a clue to sex determination, they are not enough to distinguish the sexes
unambiguously.
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