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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:55PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:55PM (#1017671)

    there is the possibility that birds simply learn what they hear, not necessarily thinking of the consequences.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday July 07 2020, @10:03PM (1 child)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @10:03PM (#1017899)

    That may be true in some cases.

    Where I live birds occupy the ecological niches that other animals take, because there are no native mammals, so these guys for instance [nzbirdsonline.org.nz] are super clever, and imitate everything they hear. They also teach new songs to each other.

    This means that when you're sitting outside on a nice spring day, the phone will ring repeatedly, and no-one will be on the other end.

    In fact a few years ago, Mrs PartTimeZombie changed her ringtone, because she was fed up with the little buggers, and they learnt her new one in a couple of days.

    The article says "Birds rarely change their chirpy little tunes..." but what they should have written was "Some birds rarely change their chirpy little tunes..." because some birds are constantly learning new ones.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @10:59PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @10:59PM (#1017910)

      The birds around here can definitely understand the alarm calls of the other birds and the squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs etc. I've seen my cat lose his prey many times because it was warned by a chipmunk or a bluejay sitting in a tree. My cat also attempts to mimic their calls, but he's not been very successful.