These birds have been singing their songs for over a thousand years (LISTEN)

    These birds have been singing their songs for over a thousand years (LISTEN)

    Not just the man. Birds also have their singing traditions which they pass down from generation to generation. American marsh sparrows have been doing this for more than 1000 years

    Not just the man. Birds also have their singing traditions which they pass down from generation to generation. American marsh sparrows have been doing this for more than 1000 years.





    According to a new study by researchers at Queen Mary University, Imperial College London and Duke University, these birds have been singing the same songs for a very long time.

    This means that they are able to teach them to their descendants, or on the contrary that the younger ones are able to learn them from the like.

    The research, published on Nature Communications, proves that birds are able to match and, why not, even surpass human cultural traditions despite their much smaller brains.

    The researchers were able to estimate that i marsh sparrows (Melospiza georgiana), a bird species originating from the swamps of the northeastern United States, accurately learn their songs 98% of the time. But what surprised them most was the fact that these animals do not randomly choose the songs to learn but opt ​​for the most common ones, a learning strategy so far considered only human prerogative, known as "conformist prejudice".

    Thanks to this ability, birds are able to pass on some songs for extraordinarily long periods of time.

    To find out, the researchers first recorded the song repertoire of 615 marsh sparrows in 6 populations in the northeastern United States. They then used computational methods to measure the diversity of songs in each population. Finally, they used a statistical method to fit the models to their data.

    This allowed the researchers to explore which learning styles were consistent with the diversity patterns of the songs they had recorded, uncovering a cultural behavior that is central to these birds' communication systems. Based on their established traditions, in fact, swamp sparrows prefer songs that are more "typical" versions over interpretations.



    The lead author, Dr. Robert Lachlan, of Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, has explained:

    “Many bird species learn their songs from other members of their species. In humans, such vocal learning leads to large communities of people sharing the same dialect, and learning in general leads to long-lasting traditions, through processes of cultural evolution. Our study suggests that animal cultural behavior may match that of humans in a couple of respects. We show that a fairly humble songbird species - there is really nothing particularly extraordinary about marsh sparrows - can generate stable cultural traditions, and that to do so it relies on behavior, conformist prejudice, which until recently he thought it was a uniquely human trait ”.

    According to the researchers, the types of songs we can hear today in the swamps of the northeastern United States may be the same as 1.000 years ago and have been transmitted precisely from generation to generation, rivaling the stability of human cultural traditions.



    Here the songs handed down for millennia by American marsh sparrows:

    READ also:

    • The app to recognize birds by their song (VIDEO)
    • Birds on the strings: the notes of nature played by a composer (VIDEO)

    Francesca Mancuso

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