Love Songs for Love Birds

By Hannah Isom

We all have our individual musical tastes, whether it’s the golden oldies that get your feet tapping, or modern tunes that make you wanna bust a move, but who’d have thought that birds would be quite so picky?

Well, apparently they are. New research into the song of the crowned sparrow has shown that chicks dig a funky new remix over the original any day.

When female sparrows in California were played two versions of their own birdsong, one from 1979 and one from 2003, it was the up-to-date version that got their feathers flapping. The study, conducted by PhD student Elizabeth Derryberry, measured the response of the sparrows to the different songs using a “copulation solicitation assay” - that’s a booty call to you and me.

"Even after only a few seconds of the new tune, the ladies were dancing around their handbags and shaking their tail feathers."

The results showed that even after only a few seconds of the new tune, the ladies were dancing around their handbags and shaking their tail feathers in a come-hither fashion toward the guys.

Though the differences between the two ‘love songs’ were only very minor, the ladies definitely preferred the new bird on the block to the old crooner. The new song was lower pitched and had a more prolonged ‘trill’ at the end than the older, more twee, higher pitched version, suggesting that today’s streetwise sparrows can’t get enough of that phat bass.

And it’s not just the girls that have such discerning tastes. It seems that their male counterparts, while not particularly aroused by the tunes, got a tad more aggressive when the new song was played. When the two songs were boomed into a group of males in their natural habitat to simulate a male intruder, the boys got more ruffled by the 2003 version. Maybe concerned mothers have been right all along when they say that today’s music incites violence.

The news has got evolutionary bird fanciers all of a flutter. While it has long been known that birds of the same species living in different communities have subtly different calls, this new evidence proves that the calls change over time as well. It is even thought that a diverse choice in music could lead to one bird species becoming two, as females only cop-off with fellas who can carry the right tune.

Derryberry now hopes to study fifteen more bird populations from Washington to California, but it looks like the trend toward lower pitched songs may be happening across the board.

Get more from top science bird, Hannah, on her page.

Or let these send you into a flutter:

Hen pecked
Does the early bird catch the worm?
Massive penguins
A contraption for feeding the tweeters

Image: Frank Hermers

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