Sparrows on my balcony – Ryan’s goosebump moment

< homepage

(text video)

The spectacular song of sparrows

Bird songs are not only beautiful, but they also contain a lot of information, such as the health and fitness of the performer. Like other birds, male sparrows sing to defend their territory and attract females. Only males sing specific melodies that they learn during a critical period of their early development.

Birds have masterfully developed auditory communication, making them, without a doubt, the vertebrates with the most complex repertoire of sound production, which reaches its peak in the elaborate songs of passerines or songbirds.

Birds can emit a wide variety of vocal sounds, from calls and cries to spectacular songs. This is a characteristic of most species, except for a few groups such as storks, vultures, and some pelicans, which, however, can produce mechanical sounds through the movement of their beaks or wings.

Bird communication: inherited or learned?

Bird calls and songs are so varied within a species that they can be said to form a vocabulary. A particular call may mean that a predator is nearby and will therefore warn other individuals of danger. Some birds use certain sounds to warn others of the presence of food.

Interestingly, geographic populations of the same species may have minor variations in their songs, which are known as dialects, and would be equivalent to the different accents that, for example, people from the coast and those from the city have, even if they speak the same language. More fascinating is the fact that subtle individual differences in voice are detected by other individuals, allowing a parent to recognize its chicks even within a colony full of chicks of the same age, as seagulls do.

This has led scientists to wonder whether singing is a learned behavior or genetically inherited from the parents. Laboratory studies have shown that the very structure of the syrinx limits the variety of sounds an individual can produce in terms of pitch and frequency. Some of the song is innate since chicks can produce the characteristic sounds of their species from a very early age. However, the structure of the song, the sequence and frequency of notes are largely learned from adults, so a chick goes through a stage of learning and perfecting the song during its development.

This ability to learn and repeat sounds has made many birds adept at mimicry. Centzontles (their name means four hundred voices in Nahuatl), cuitlacoches and mulattos can learn a wide variety of sounds, such as other birds’ songs, dog barks and cat meows.

Similarly, the lyrebirds of Australia have been found to be able to imitate the sounds of a horse’s hooves. The masters of the art of mimicry are undoubtedly parrots, which can reproduce a wide variety of sounds thanks to their robust tongues, crows, and mynah birds, all of which are very popular as pets because of their ability to imitate the human voice.