Bird songs change with environment

[Staff]

Bird songs change with environment
Contact: Kevin Stacey
University of Chicago Press Journals
Public release date: 20-May-2009

Bird songs change with environment
excerpt from above:

Why would thicker vegetation cause slower songs?

Leaves create an echo. A slower tune, Derryberry says, is less apt to be garbled by reverberation.

"Young male sparrows learn to sing by listening to adult males nearby," she explains. "Juveniles likely learn and repeat the songs they hear most clearly." Since the slower songs come through loud and clear in leafy surroundings, those are the ones that are learned and passed on to the next generation. After a while, the slower songs dominate.

Derryberry's study is the first to show that rapid habitat shifts can cause changes in birdsongs. She now plans to extend her research to investigate how habitat changes associated with global warming might cause birds to sing a different tune.

[TheLorax]

Very interesting. More reasons to work at removing invasive species from our understories.