Male sparrows are less intimidated by the songs of aging rivals

The same singing that marks a male as 'the guy to beat' at age two signals that he's 'obsolete' by age 10

Date: January 17, 2020

Source: Duke University

Few singers reach their sunset years with the same voice they had in younger days. Singing sparrows are no different. Duke University-led research reveals that elderly swamp sparrows don't sound quite like they used to -- nor do they strike the same fear in other males who may be listening in.

Humans are remarkably good at guessing a person's age just by hearing their voice. But this is the first time the phenomenon has been demonstrated in wild animals, said Duke biology professor and study co-author Steve Nowicki.

The findings were published on January 7 in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

During the early spring, a male swamp sparrow stakes out a breeding territory and threatens any male who dares to trespass on his turf. If a potential rival enters another male's territory and starts to sing, the resident male says "Get out!" by singing back with a rapid weet-weet-weet and flying toward the intruder. Eventually, if all else fails, he attacks.

Previous research by this team showed that male swamp sparrows reach their peak as vocalists at age two, and start to decline after that, singing less frequently and less consistently as they get older.

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Teaching wild birds to sing a new tune

Date:  October 4, 2018

Source:  Cell Press

Like toddlers learning to speak, young birds learn to sing by listening to the voices of adults. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on October 4 have shown for the first time that they could teach young sparrows in the wild how to sing a new tune. The wild birds then passed the new songs on to the next generation.

"I was quite shocked that our loudspeakers succeeded in teaching wild birds to sing," says Dan Mennill from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. "The sparrows in our island-living population had abundant opportunities to learn songs from live tutors, and yet thirty birds learned songs from the loudspeakers, providing experimental evidence of vocal learning."

Conventional experiments of vocal learning in birds have been conducted in the laboratory. But such studies are much more difficult to do in the wild. The researchers overcame the challenges in the new study by focusing their attention on Savannah Sparrows living at Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island. The sparrows on this island often return to the place of their birth to breed as adults. That made it possible for researchers to expose young birds to novel songs and then record those same animals when they returned from migration to breed the next year.

Mennill's team, including researchers from the University of Windsor, University of Guelph, and Williams College, developed a new type of loudspeaker that is programmable, solar powered, light activated, and weatherproof. The speakers allowed them to broadcast adult songs with distinctive acoustic signatures for the wild sparrows over tutoring sessions that lasted for months. Over a six-year period between 2013 and 2018, they experimentally tutored five cohorts of Savannah Sparrows, from the time they hatched to adulthood.

Across the five cohorts, thirty birds produced songs that matched the broadcasted songs. Those songs differed from anything the birds would have heard otherwise. In all thirty cases, the researchers report, the birds produced songs containing phrases that had never been recorded on the island in three decades of field study.

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Scientists remind their peers: Female birds sing, too

Date:  March 14, 2018

Source:  American Ornithological Society Publications Office

When North American ornithologists hear a bird singing, they're likely to assume it's a male. But in many species, the females sing too -- and a new commentary in The Auk: Ornithological Advancesargues that a better understanding of these unappreciated female songs could lead to advances in many aspects of bird biology.

Authors Karan Odom of Cornell University and Lauryn Benedict of the University of Northern Colorado both discovered the world of female birdsong through their own research. "I started studying California towhees 17 years ago, and I was fascinated by the duet vocalization given by females and males," says Benedict. "That led me to start looking for female song in other North American bird species, and I was surprised to learn that it was much more common than I expected. The reports of female song are buried in odd corners of the literature, but when you put them all together, you start to see some interesting patterns."

Though singing females were likely the norm among the ancestors of today's songbirds, female song today is understudied and is underrepresented in collections of bird sound recordings. This, say Odom and Benedict, may be result of bias toward the world's temperate regions -- though more widespread in temperate species than many ornithologists appreciate, female song is most common among tropical birds. They argue that better documentation of which species female song is present in and more detailed descriptions of female song structure and output could improve our understanding of birds' comparative physiology, neurobiology, behavioral ecology, evolution, and even conservation. Birds of conservation concern are often located and identified by song during surveys, and assumptions that all singing birds are male could mislead wildlife managers about the state of populations.

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Female birds that used to be silent are now singing like males

27 October 2017

By Andy Coghlan

For the first time, female dark-eyed juncos have been found to burst into song in the wild. Although many female tropical birds sing, singing females are rare among northern, temperate songbirds. However, the behaviour is now becoming more common, and climate change may mean it becomes even more widespread.

Dustin Reichard of Ohio Wesleyan University knew that female dark-eyed juncos (Junco hyemalis) sometimes sang in captivity, but only after being injected with testosterone. To find out if they sang in the wild, he and his colleagues goaded them by placing a live, caged female in their territories. The researchers also played recordings of a soft trill that females make when they are receptive to mating.

In all, 17 females, along with 25 males, interacted with the caged females. Half the females dived and lunged at them, and a minority also performed aggressive tail-spreads not normally seen in females. Three of the females sang songs similar to those of males.

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Why do birds sing?

By Lipu & Alice Paone

When we talk about birdsong, we cannot simply refer to a single "voice". It is a great chorus of complex sounds, it is a real language in itself. The dry "teak" of a sparrow, the plaintive "gheck gheck gheck" of a woodpecker, the shrill "chirrip" of a lark – each sound has its own purpose and is used in very specific circumstances. For birdwatchers, learning how to ‘decode’ the secret language of birds is a great way to identify different species and to better understand their behaviour.

The language of birds

Just as vowels and consonants provide the foundation for our words and sentences, birds produce a series of calls, songs and melodies in a ‘language’ so nuanced it could rival our very own alphabet! This is all thanks to a special vocal organ called the syrinx – the size of a pea, it sits at the junction of the trachea and the bronchi in the lungs. Its structure – which varies with each species – makes such different songs and sounds possible. Each sound has a different purpose and this, in turn, makes it possible for birds to communicate with each other in different circumstances.

The warning calls

These involve sharp and penetrating sounds – warning signals used by birds whenever they feel threatened and want to warn companions of danger. They are usually short sounds strong enough to be heard at great distances. The same sound is often used by predatory birds as part of their attack.

The cries for help

"Mom Mom Mom!" Just as children call for their mother with arms outstretched, small birds emit little moans and chirps to attract their mother’s attention, often flapping their wings for good measure. The call intensity is low, but it can still be clearly perceived in the vicinity of a nest. Small birds frequently continue to use these calls after leaving the nest too – because mom is always mom!

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Watch: This Little Bird Can Sing With Its Wings

The broadbill's strange song may set your heart aflutter.

    

By Ashley P. Taylor

March 30, 2016

Most birds have to open their beaks to sing, but when it comes to the dainty broadbill, all it has to do is wiggle its wings. In African and Rufous-sided Broadbills, circular flight displays (see the video below) are accompanied by a pulsing song that can be heard from more than 300 feet away. The brreeeeet sound, which resembles a klaxon horn, doesn’t come from vocalizations, but rather from the fluttering of wing feathers, as explained in a study published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Some types of birds, such as hummingbirds and doves, can sing with both their syrinx—the avian equivalent of a voicebox—and their wings and tails, says study author Christopher Clark, a researcher at the University of California, Riverside. Clark knew that broadbills make some pretty cool noises, too, but wasn't sure whether they came from the bill or the feathers.

To find out, Clark and his colleagues traveled to Uganda to take video and audio recordings of African and Rufous-sided Broadbills during their circular flight—a behavior the scientists speculate might be for romancing and defending territory. Back in the lab, they analyzed the clips and correlated the sound pulses with the down strokes of the wings. The scientists also noticed gaps between a handful of the 10 primary feathers—located at the outermost part of the wing and connected to the bird’s wrist bone.

Read on and watch video...

Singing in the brain: Songbirds sing like humans

A songbirds' vocal muscles work like human speakers, singers

Date:January 12, 2016

Source:Emory Health Sciences

A songbirds' vocal muscles work like those of human speakers and singers, finds a study recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience. The research on Bengalese finches showed that each of their vocal muscles can change its function to help produce different parameters of sounds, in a manner similar to that of a trained opera singer.

"Our research suggests that producing really complex song relies on the ability of the songbirds' brains to direct complicated changes in combinations of muscles," says Samuel Sober, a biologist at Emory University and lead author of the study. "In terms of vocal control, the bird brain appears as complicated and wonderful as the human brain."

Pitch, for example, is important to songbird vocalization, but there is no single muscle devoted to controlling it. "They don't just contract one muscle to change pitch," Sober says. "They have to activate a lot of different muscles in concert, and these changes are different for different vocalizations. Depending on what syllable the bird is singing, a particular muscle might increase pitch or decrease pitch."

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I'm Singing in the Rainforest: Researchers Find Striking Similarities Between Bird Song and Human Music

Oct. 16, 2013 — The Musician Wren (Cyphorhynus arada) is aptly-named, because these birds use the same intervals in their songs that are heard as consonant in many human cultures. This is what composer and musicologist Emily Doolittle and the biologist Henrik Brumm found out in their zoomusicological study. Consonant intervals are perceived to fit well together. They sound calm and stable, and are the basis for keys in Western Music. It is because Musician Wrens preferentially produce successive perfect octaves, fifths, and fourths that their songs sound musical to human listeners.

In fact the researchers found passages in the songs of the Musician Wrens with striking similarity to passages of e.g. the composers Bach and Haydn. "However, this does not mean that the musician wren is singing in a key the way a human musician might. Rather, the bird's preference for consonances leads to occasional conjunctions of pitches which sound to human listeners like they are drawn from the same scale," says Emily Doolittle.

In 2011, Emily Doolittle was composer-in-residence at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, where she collaborated with ornithologist Henrik Brumm in researching song of the musician wren, gathered birdsongs for future musical use, and presented a concert of her birdsong-related works, performed by members of the Bavarian State Opera.

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Songbirds Turn On and Tune Up

June 26, 2013 — Bullfinches learn from human teachers to sing melodies accurately, according to a new study by the late Nicolai Jürgen and researchers from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. Their analysis of human melody singing in bullfinches gives insights into the songbirds' brain processes.

The work is published online in Springer's journal Animal Cognition.

Eurasian bullfinch

Music performance is considered to be one of the most complex and demanding cognitive challenges that the human mind can undertake. Melody singing requires precise timing of several organized actions as well as accurate control of different pitches and durations of consecutive notes. The songs of free-living bullfinches are soft and contain syllables that are similar to the whistled notes of human melodies. Teaching birds to imitate human melodies was a popular hobby in the 18th and 19th centuries and the bullfinch was the favorite species.

Using historical data recorded for 15 bullfinches, hand-raised by Jürgen Nicolai between 1967-1975, the researchers studied whether the bullfinches memorized and recalled the note sequence of the melodies in smaller subunits, as humans do, (in chunks or 'modules') or in their entirety, as a linear chain, which is much simpler. The researchers also analyzed the accuracy of the bullfinch's choices and how a bird continues to sing after the human partner pauses. They focused on whether the bird chooses the right note sequence at the right time -- so-called alternate singing.

Read on

Whether trill or gobble, birds sing song of attraction

Mar 27, 2013   Written by

Francis Skalicky

Missouri Department of Conservation

The more you know about bird song, the more you’re apt to be fascinated by this well-known ritual of spring.

We all know spring is a prime time to hear birds. These bird sounds can range from a cardinal’s melodious trill to a turkey’s loud gobble: All are forms of springtime bird vocalization.

These sounds that are often entertaining to human ears are necessary parts of a bird’s annual life cycle.

Why there’s so much bird song at this time of year is a well-known fact: It’s often the males that are vocalizing, and they’re usually either trying to court a female or are telling another male that he’s intruding. However, there are other details of bird song that are often overlooked, like, why does the bulk of spring bird song occur in the morning.

There are a number of theories about this and several probably have some validity.

Some biologists think birds instinctually know this is a good time to make noise — especially for courtship. There is generally little or no wind at this time of day and, as a result, bird sounds tend to carry greater distances.

There’s also a theory that, because the lower temperatures at sunrise tend to squelch insect activity and, thus, many types of birds can’t be feeding during this time, it’s a good time to work on the duties of courtship and territorial establishment.

If you stop and listen to bird songs, you’ll notice some males have a varied repertoire of calls and can sometimes make their calls quite complex. As with every other characteristic of nature, this is another form of biology at work.

In the bird world, having greater vocal skills is a sign of being stronger and healthier and a better mate. These are the kind of sounds female birds want to hear because besides survival, their other main goal is to produce strong, healthy offspring.

Physical makeup assists birds with their song variation. A bird’s syrinx — which is its voice box and the equivalent of a human’s larynx — is situated much closer to the lungs than a larynx is to human lungs. This arrangement allows birds to produce a greater variety of sounds than humans.

Read on:  http://www.news-leader.com/article/20130328/LIFE06/303280042/francis-skalicky-Whether-trill-or-gobble-birds-sing-song-of-attraction?nclick_check=1