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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 07 2020, @08:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the 🐦♪ dept.

A 'Viral' New Bird Song in Canada Is Causing Sparrows to Change Their Tune

Birds rarely change their chirpy little tunes, and when they do, it's typically limited to the local environment, where slight song variants basically become regional dialects. New research published today in Current Biology describes an extraordinary exception to this rule, in which a novel song sung by white-throated sparrows is spreading across Canada at an unprecedented rate. What's more, the new song appears to be replacing the pre-existing melody, which dates as far back as the 1960s.

Birds sing to mark their territories and attract prospective mates. Traditionally, white-throated sparrows in western and central Canada sing a song distinguished by its three-note ending. The new song, which likely started off as a regional dialect at some point between 1960 and 2000, features a distinctive two-note ending, and it's taking the sparrow community by storm. What makes the new ending so viral is a mystery to the study authors, led by Ken Otter from the University of Northern British Columbia.

"These songs are learned—otherwise new variants would not arise or spread," Otter told Gizmodo. "Where it started could have been a single bird, but it then gets learned by others, and they would form tutors for other birds. It wouldn't spread from a single bird."

The new song, which can now be heard from British Columbia through to central Ontario—a distance of over 1,900 miles (3,000 km)—spread between 2000 and 2019, according to the research. The old melody, with its highly musical triplet outro, is now at risk of going extinct.

Journal Reference:
Ken A. Otter. Continent-wide Shifts in Song Dialects of White-Throated Sparrows, Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.084)


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @11:35AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @11:35AM (#1017560)

    Canadian here. The local sparrows have all begun singing "On Top of Old Smokey" at the top of their lungs beginning at 5am. Very annoying.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:29PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:29PM (#1017652)

    I was thinking they had discovered an adaptation of "Baby Shark".

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:49PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:49PM (#1017665)

    a novel song sung by white-throated sparrows is spreading across Canada at an unprecedented rate. What's more, the new song appears to be replacing the pre-existing melody, which dates as far back as the 1960s.

    Could this new song translate to: "Fuck me it's hot lately, bugs aren't dying in winter, gotta migrate farther and farther north, that damn muskeg is stinking more and more."?

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