Language has long been considered the exclusive provenance of humans.
But in the animal kingdom, birds, not primates, communicate with the level of vocal complexity and variability closest to ours. Ornithologists have made progress in understanding the rich variety of ways in which birds converse, thanks in part to large and growing databases of bird calls such as one from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which includes millions of recordings captured by citizen scientists.
This summer the New York Times birding project is encouraging readers to try birding by ear. So here’s a quick tour of the avian soundscape.
Each bird species has its own distinct set of sounds. Consider the black-capped chickadee, which frequents the northern United States and southern Canada year-round.
Compared to bird calls, birdsongs tend to be more complex, with multiple notes and a clear pattern. And many songbirds learn them; they aren’t born already knowing them.
Ornithologists have called this process a form of cultural evolution. “Birdsong has a lot of parallels to human language,” said Karina Sanchez, an expert on avian communication at the University of New Hampshire.
With citizen science recordings, researchers have found regional dialects within species, and slight changes that, over years, have become dominant across populations.
Here is a song from a great thrush, a bird common in the highlands of northwest South America.
Some birds attract mates not with a species-specific song, but through a large repertoire, including sounds borrowed from other species.
For example, the brown thrasher, which can be found from eastern North America to parts of southern Canada, has one of the largest repertoires in North America with over 1,000 songs.
But avian mimicry goes beyond copying other birds. Some birds are known to imitate wallabies, humans and even machines.
You can learn more about the bird calls and songs around you by using the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s free Merlin Bird ID app, which The Times is encouraging people to use for its summer birding project.
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Can You Understand Bird? Test Your Recognition of Calls and Songs - The New York Times
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