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Rapping song birds

By omnibrain on December 6, 2006.

bird.jpg
Well It seems that I'm on a bird kick this morning.

Birds living in cities are performing a type of "avian rap" while their rural counterparts are sticking to more traditional sounds, a study shows.
Dutch researchers found that urban species of birds sing short, fast songs rather than the slower melodies of countryside birds.
City birds also sing at a higher pitch and will try out different song types.
Experts said city birds have adapted to counter background noise and increase their chances of finding a mate.

They speculate that "birds had developed shorter, more varied, higher pitched sounds to make themselves heard above trains, aircraft and road traffic."
Anyone have other speculations? something besides the volume hypothesis?
Ohh.. and the birds are called "great tits" I'm sure you can imagine what kind of results i got on google image search.
And the original article.........here.

Tags
biology

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Volume schmol-ume. I would guess its because they learned to integrate sounds from their environment--which are at a greater diversity of pitches--into their song repetoire. Some of the old birdsong studies (rotting away in dusty tomes) found that depriving birds of any sound was enough to mess up their song (no song, or alternatively, a garbled mess of a song). Logically, it could work the other way 'round. Introducing young birds to many more types of sounds will likely also change the tonology of the crystallized song. What would be interesting would be to take the 'city birds' and let them have offspring in the quieter country and see if the song is truly environmental (or perhaps the song is transmitter to the young, so switch out the eggs)....

ahh... thanks shelley that's exactly what I was wondering :)

I would suggest that Steve tries a better image search service next time. According to our new syndicating partners who has left Google, Picsearch provides the most relevant image search service today. Please try "great tits" or any other query on http://www.picsearch.com and judge for yourself.

I'm so glad you decided to use my comments section to do some advertising! wow that's fabulous!