Swamp Sparrows Display Evidence of Centuries-Old Tradition in Their Songs

[Judi Lynn]

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum on 23 Jun 2018 at 10:00AM

If you start listening to birds, you’ll realise that they have a species-specific sets of calls. Would you consider these songs a form of culture? Maybe, maybe not — but bird calls are passed down through generations, much as human traditions are. And it appears that some birds may have song traditions that persist over centuries.

At least, that’s what new research has found, through modelling and observations of hundreds of swamp sparrows, a bird native to North America. While somewhat anthropomorphising, the study’s conclusion suggests the sparrows have a bird version of cultural traditions.

“We’re able to demonstrate that they learn quite precisely, and they have a conformist bias — they have stable cultural traditions, with song types that can last many hundreds of years,” study author Robert Lachlan from Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom told Gizmodo.

The researchers recorded 615 male swamp sparrows’ entire musical repertoires for a year in the northeastern United States. These birds typically learn a dozen syllable types (shown in pink on the graph below) in their youth, ultimately only using three or so in adulthood. The researchers noticed that the birds can learn these songs with high accuracy.

More:
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2018/06/swamp-sparrows-display-evidence-of-centuries-old-tradition-in-their-songs/