Guest Essay by Kip Hansen – 24 July 2020
I like birds – big birds, small birds, common birds, rare birds – all kinds of birds. I have fed them in my backyard for years and watched then wherever my travels have taken me. I am not your typical birder – I just find birds interesting.
This story offers a break – albeit a short one — from the noise and tumult of the various popular delusions that are currently circulating and stirring up the feeble-minded and faint-of-heart among the general public: Covid Madness, Climate Change Madness, BLM Madness, Cancel Culture Madness, Trump Derangement Madness – to mention a few.
Please note that there is nothing important about this story. There is no scientific breakthrough. But it is interesting on a couple of intellectual fronts.
Here’s the headline from Popular Science:
“White-throated sparrows are ditching their classic song for a new tune
The birds are abandoning their old song with unprecedented speed”
A brief synopsis from the PopSci piece:
“When ornithologist Ken Otter moved to Prince George in northern British Columbia in 1999, he soon noticed that there was something odd about one of the songs the birds in his new home were singing.
Otter was used to hearing male white-throated sparrows, which are common across much of North America, whistling a tune that ends with a repeating set of three notes, known as a triplet. But when he and his colleague Scott Ramsay, now at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, listened carefully to recordings of the sparrows in Otter’s new home, they couldn’t identify the musical trio. They quickly realized that the birds were singing a different variant of the song that ended in a set of two notes called a doublet.
Otter, Ramsay, and their colleagues have been tracking this new dialect over two decades. During this time, it has swept across the continent and begun to replace the old triplet-driven version of the sparrow’s song. This appears to be the fastest documented case where a new dialect has caught on and spread to birds far and wide, the team reported [link is a .pdf] on July 2 in the journal Current Biology.
So, for “unprecedented speed”, read 70 years, maybe more (see more on the time period below).
Yes, these audio-orthinologists have actually followed this changing bird song for over 20 years, and have finally turned in their report. Not only have they followed this changing song, but they have tracked which birds are singing it and where they might be passing it along – a sort of bird-song epidemiology. They report: [link to report .pdf]
“In Brief:
Otter et al. study the cultural evolution of song variants in white-throated sparrows. Using songs of nearly 1,800 males recorded between 2000 and 2019, Otter et al. show the progressive adoption of one song variant (doublet-ending song) by males starting in western Canada and sweeping over 3,000 km eastward to replace the traditional triplet-ending songs.
And summarized as:
“White-throated sparrows, Zonotrichia albicolis, for example, traditionally sing a whistled song terminating in a repeated triplet of notes, which was the ubiquitous variant in surveys across Canada in the 1960s. However, doublet-ending songs emerged and replaced triplet-ending songs west of the Rocky Mountains sometime between 1960 and 2000 and appeared just east of the Rockies in the 2000s. From recordings collected over two decades across North America, we show that doublet-ending song has now spread at a continental scale. Using geolocator tracking, we confirm that birds from western Canada, where doublet-ending songs originated, overwinter with birds from central Canada, where the song initially spread. This suggests a potential mechanism for spread through song tutoring on wintering grounds.”
Fascinating. Fascinating that anyone cares enough about the male mating song of the white-throated sparrow to study it for 20 years over both a 70-year time span and a over a continental-scale geographical area. Regardless of one’s opinion on the value to human society of such an endeavor, that is scientific dedication.
The New York Times covered the story as well, and offered audio clips for the two song variants. You can play them in the Times web page linked or download/listen to them here as .wav files: Triplet-ending Song and Doublet-ending Song.
We now return you to your regular programming covering The Madness of Crowds.
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Author’s Comment:
In spite of the odd behavior of the humans, Nature just keeps rolling along. Birth and death, evolving behaviors, landscapes change from forests to meadows to grasslands and back again, and all without requiring permission from the silly humans who far too often believe they are in charge of everything.
When it all seems just too much, I suggest getting out and sleeping under the open sky watching stars slowly move across the heavens. I did so last night – as always, very mentally and spiritually refreshing.
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Could you tell me just what tune a Mocking birds sing, from what I hear it a medley of about every other bird songs. I grew up and the north and miss the robin’s song in the spring, so solace is the Mocking birds song which is pretty much 24/7 most of the year except in the high heat of our summer days. I was puzzled when I was out earlies to day as to what bird was making the racket I was hearing. It came to me finally, it was a raven.
I’ve no clue what a mocking bird sounds like when isn’t imitating another bird.
But one of my friends told me of a mocking bird that would let out the call of a red tailed hawk.
After the other birds scattered, it would come down to his bird feeder.
Food.
What do these “guys” feed on?
Parametric change in food, the main energy source,
usually effects all or almost all behavior…
singing also, included.
cheers
Some say that song birds around Buckingham Palace, London, have been heard mimicking “God Save the Queen.”. In Berkeley Square the nightingales have not changed their tune.
Geoff S
It’s obvious. The girls like minimalism.
I have lived in Temple, TX (Bell county, central Texas) all of my 58 years. Bell county has only one species of grackle (Black bird). During a time period roughly equal to the recent warming period I noticed that grackles had changed their mating call from the one I had known so well from my teenage/young adult life. They went to a much shorter, less intricate call.
There was one study from 2012 that claimed bird songs changed with city noise. But this wouldn’t explain the local change in grackle calls for the following reason.
In the past five years I noticed that grackles are slowly reverting back to the call they used in the 1970s-80s. As Temple, TX has grown from 35,000 people in 1980 to around 76,000 today I can’t believe that in the past five years Temple is suddenly becoming as quiet as it was in 1980. So city noise can’t explain the change in grackle calls.
Myron ==> Ah, many of the “whys” supplied by humans are imaginary . . . . mostly we don’t have a clue for the “why?” questions of Nature.
For a couple of years we had an increasing number of Eurasian collared dove with annoying habits and a song of goo-GOO-goo (so says Wiki). There have not been so many this year.
We feed Black Oil Sunflower seeds (mostly) and have lots of Valley Quail (Calif. Quail). Some claim the call is Chi-ca-go, but I hear “Come over here.”
Eastern and Western Meadowlark songs differ, and Westerners have fewer.
John, people here in rural Australia like to keep guinea fowl. Not only are their eggs good eating but the birds attack and kill snakes. They also sound a raucous call as a warning which sounds very much like “look up, look up, look up”.
Now anyone who owns guinea fowl will hear them saying this and it will drive them nuts… or they will be saved from a snake encounter.
Same thing happened with the song of the humpback whale off Australia
See Cultural revolution in whale songs: Humpbacks have picked up a catchy tune sung by immigrants from a distant ocean.
I’m sure these sparrows have been singing these two versions for eons. Nothing new.
Perhaps it’s human caused Bird Acoustification?
Like Ocean Acidification?
Science.
From the article: “This suggests a potential mechanism for spread through song tutoring on wintering grounds.”
Monkey see, monkey do.
It *was* a very interesting article, Kip.
Tom ==> Thanks, I hoped it would be — at least to someone.
I don’t have a reference other than an aging memory but I do remember reading somewhere a decade or so ago that birds in the suburbs are “singing” earlier in the morning due to the increase in noise as us humans begin to wake up.
I don’t know if that’s true or not.
From Central Ohio:
For the first time in over 10 years we began again to feed the birds.
I’m glad we did.
We were given a couple of seed bells, one of them loaded with hot sauce to deter squirrels.
We’ve continued with the hot seed bells adding suet cakes.
In the spring, before the leaves were on the trees, I once counted 7 blue birds outside our kitchen window.
I’d seen a blue bird or two at times but never that many at once.
(Since then I’ve learned that, if like blue birds, it’s worth paying a bit extra for the dried meal worms to mix in with your seed.)
I’ve also seen a pair of cowbirds frequent our yard. Cowbirds don’t build nest. The female lays an egg in other birds’ nest for them to raise it. It will push the other eggs out after it hatches. ( I did see a male cowbird five years or more ago before emerge from a nest wrens had made in one of our hanging baskets out front. It had an egg in it’s beak.)
A month or so ago I noticed 3 birds in our front yard. Two sparrows were hopping looking for bugs. Then I noticed that they were then going to the third bird, which was almost twice their size, and feeding it. I assume they were cowbird victims.
I’ve also seen a pair of catbirds. Never noticed catbirds before. That get their name from one of their songs which sounds like a cat. I’ve heard it. It does.
If a cowbird lays an egg in a catbird nest, the catbird will break it and eject it from the nest.
(Good for them!)
Gunga ==> Thanks for the bird stories
We quit feeding the birds, but exactly on purpose. A racoon got three of our ducks, so the other two had to go into a greenhouse for safety for the rest of the winter. Spring hit and so did the grasshopper hordes, so the ducks age hoppers. We have started feeding the ducks again, but no sign of the birds so far. Plus, the drought killed the grass and limited the mosquito population, so the nighthawks even seem to have vanished.
Whlle I like watching birds and photographing them, the one that signs LOUDLY at 2AM better stay hidden…That is one bird I do not like.
Sheri ==> I have a crazed night-singer in my area as well — starts in just before dawn . . . ..