Robin hushed: Wind turbines are making songbirds change their tune

December 21, 2018 by Mark Whittingham, The Conversation

Wind turbines are a leading source of green energy which could supply 12% of the world's energy by 2020. But their use is often criticised for its impact on wildlife, particularly birds. Larger birds can collide with turbines and some have even learned to avoid flying near them.

Impacts on smaller birds are less well documented as they tend to manoeuvre around turbines and can avoid impacting with them much more easily than larger species. My own research showed that birds associated with farmland, including a range of songbirds, were generally unfazed – their winter distribution didn't change in the presence of turbines.

But there were also some intriguing patterns in the behaviour of skylarks in early spring. We noticed their numbers were generally lower close to turbines. I wondered then whether the noise emitted by the turbines might be responsible.

Wind turbines and songbird communication

Much of the evidence for how wind turbines affect birds concerns their distribution patterns around turbines, but we know little about why birds choose to avoid them. The robin, a widespread small bird which lives in rural areas where turbines are common, seemed a perfect candidate to investigate.

Robins are an aggressive but popular species in the UK, having recently been voted the nation's favourite bird. Males are territorial beyond proportion to their diminutive size. Nevertheless, we subjected territorial male robins to one of three treatments – another robin's song, a robin's song with wind turbine noise, and wind turbine noise alone – via a sound recording device inside their territory.

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Macaws may communicate visually with blushing, ruffled feathers

August 22, 2018, Public Library of Science

Parrots—highly intelligent and highly verbal—may also ruffle their head feathers and blush to communicate visually, according to a new study published August 22 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Aline Bertin of the INRA Centre Val de Loire, France and colleagues. The study extends the understanding of the complex social lives of these remarkable birds.

The authors studied five hand-reared captive blue-and-yellow macaws (Ara ararauna) interacting with one another and with their human caretakers. They assessed the feather position (ruffled or sleeked) on the crown, nape, and cheek, as well as the presence or absence of blushing on the bare skin of the cheek. They found that feather ruffling was more common when the birds were not in motion, such as during social interactions and resting periods. Crown feather ruffling and blushing were both more common when the human caretaker was actively interacting with the parrot by talking and maintaining eye contact than when the keeper was in the room but ignoring and turning their backs to the bird. Together, these results suggest that head feather ruffling is associated with states of lower arousal and positive social interactions, the authors concluded.

"How birds use facial displays and whether they communicate their inner subjective feelings is a question that is crucial to deepening our understanding of bird sentience," say Bertin et al. "Although caution must be exercised when interpreting these data due to the small sample size, we argue that crown ruffling and skin color variation may provide facial indicators of birds' inner subjective feelings. On a practical level, parrots are popular companion animals, with millions of parrots being kept as pets, and understanding visual communication in parrots may help to assess their well-being in captive conditions."

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Birds can be grammar nerds too

Birds get one step closer to being smarter than you.

By 

Melissa Dahl 

Source: Science of Us

10 MAR 2016 - 10:36 AM UPDATED 10 MAR 2016 - 10:36 AM

Fine, so various species of animals have demonstrated signs of traits we might once have considered “uniquely human” — empathy, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence, to name just a few. But grammar! We humans still have our grammar in general, and syntax in particular. That still makes us special, right?

Maybe not, reports the Washington Post’s Rachel Feltman. According to a new paper in Nature Communications, a particular type of bird — the Japanese great tit, similar to the chickadee in North America — uses syntax in its communication with its fellow birds. More specifically, as Feltman writes, these birds use a particular type of syntax: compositional, referring to the way a sentence or, in this case, a series of chirps — is structured. We humans use compositional syntax to get across complex ideas. For example:

“Careful, it’s dangerous” is a phrase that has meaning, and so is “come toward me.” When those two phrases are combined, they have a different meaning than they do on their own: They’re directing the receiver to act in a different way than either phrase would independently.

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Bird communication: Chirping with syntax

Date: March 8, 2016

Source: University of Zurich

People communicate meaning by combining words according to syntactic rules. But this ability is not limited solely to humans: A group of evolutionary biologists have discovered that Japanese great tits, like humans, have also evolved syntax. By combining their various calls using specific rules, these songbirds can communicate specific messages and engage in complex interactions.

Language is one of the defining characteristics of human beings: It enables us to generate unlimited meanings from a finite number of phonetic elements. Using syntactic rules, humans are able to combine words to form phrases and sentences, and thus ascribe meaning to various things and activities. Research on communication systems suggests that non-human primates and birds, too, have evolved the ability to assign meaning to arbitrary vocal elements. But until now, the evolution of syntax has been considered unique to human language.

Warning signal plus mating call means "flock together"

Evolutionary biologists at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan, the Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Zurich are now challenging this view. For the first time, these researchers have demonstrated that Japanese great tits (Parus minor) have developed syntactic rules. These small birds are known for their large vocal repertoire, and the team discovered that they use a variety of calls and combinations of calls to interact with one another in specific situations. The combination of sounds such as the "ABC calls," for instance, means "watch out!." The great tits use them when a sparrowhawk or another predator is nearby -- a potentially dangerous situation. By contrast, "D calls" mean "come over here," a call the birds use after discovering a new source of food or when wanting their partner to come to the nest.

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Pair bonding reinforced in the brain: Zebra finches use their specialized song system for simple communication

Date:

October 28, 2014

Source:

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Summary:

In addition to their song, songbirds also have an extensive repertoire of calls. While the species-specific song must be learned as a young bird, most calls are, as in the case of all other birds, innate. Researchers have now discovered that in zebra finches the song control system in the brain is also active during simple communication calls. This relationship between unlearned calls and an area of the brain responsible for learned vocalizations is important for understanding the evolution of song learning in songbirds.

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Vocal variety in African penguins: Four basic vocalizations used for adult communication, two more for the young

Date:

July 30, 2014

Source:

PLOS

Summary:

Adult African penguins communicate using four different vocalizations and juveniles and chicks use two begging calls to request food.

Adult African penguins communicate using four different vocalizations and juveniles and chicks use two begging calls to request food, according to a study published July 30, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Livio Favaro and colleagues from University of Turin, Italy.

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