Now that the birds are singing again I’m intrigued by news of birdsong.
Just this week I learned that a study found that teenage male birds sing better when the “girls” are around.
Songbirds learn their songs as they mature. They babble as babies and improve as they get older.
Scientists at University of California San Francisco decided to find out how birds learn this skill by recording teenage male zebra finches singing under a variety of social conditions.
As expected the “boys” could sing, but not very well. When alone they sounded immature. But the researchers were surprised that in the presence of a female the boys sang much better, almost like adults.
“The birds picked the best version of the song that they could possibly perform and they sang it over and over again,” said senior author Allison Doupe, MD, PhD in Science Daily.
The study found that social cues improved the birds singing skills faster than when they practiced alone. Ultimately, this finding may provide new ways to improve speech therapy for humans.
It also shows that teenagers are the same the world over. Even among birds, the boys show off for the girls.
Read more about the study here in Science Daily.
(photo of zebra finches from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original.)
Cute entry. Thanks.
I put off, for as long as I could, trying to learn bird songs when i first started to bird. It seemed overwhelming as a new birder to consider sound along with all the visual information I was trying to digest. Once I began to delve into sound however, I was hooked. It’s like discovering birding all over again.
I would recommend the book “Birdsong: A Natural History” by Don Stap. It is a very fascinating book that gave me a much greater appreciation of bird songs.
For folks really, really interested in learning a lot more about bird song, there is the book “The Singing Life of Birds” by Donald Kroodsma.