In the summer young birds learn to sing
It is one of the most intriguing questions in ornithology (the study of birds): how do birds learn to sing?
Do they actually learn? Is birdsong innate or learned?
It is the same question that occupies man about his own behavior.
There is a bird sound. Is it a nightingale…? The nightingale, on a balmy evening? The males with their impressive song, with crescendos and powerful trills, which charm the females and at the same time let the other singing males know that they are the boss here, in this spot, in this territory. Deep into July, nightingales had not been heard for weeks. A bird sings in a buckthorn grove, in the Aanschotse Beemden, its most beautiful song, otherwise it is quiet.
Except for that strange, soft, long, murmuring song that comes low from the sea buckthorn bush. A bush so dense that no human being can approach the maker of that song. Even if you try to discover something in the tangle of branches with a binoculars, it will not work. Yet in this rickety version there are clear elements of nightingale singing. It could just be a young nightingale singing. A youngster that fledged only a few weeks ago. This is really one of the most fascinating aspects of bird watching and listening: you keep discovering and being surprised time and time again.
Dziep… dziep… dziep
Is birdsong innate or learned? Or perhaps a mix of both? The short answer to that is the latter, when it comes to songbirds. Young songbirds certainly have a blueprint of their species-specific song in their genes, which they recognize. That is important, because otherwise they would take over the song of another species. But they also learn to sing by listening to other birds and practicing that too. Research in the field, but also in laboratories, has given us a lot of insight into how this works. That research was mainly done on only a limited number of species, including zebra finch, song bunting, nightingale, chaffinch and – yes yes! – the canary.
There are a number of stages in the learning process, which have many variations but are fixed in order. Young birds begin the learning process as soon as they fledge. It usually stops once they defend a territory themselves, often in the following spring. But not always; young grass warblers can breed in just a few months and also learn the song. In this case one of the simplest forms of singing we know: dziep… dziep… dziep….
Bird song books
The virtuoso bird song guide – Learn to recognize bird sounds through a handy system with The virtuoso bird song guide by Nico de Haan. Includes QR codes to all of Nico’s bird sounds and mnemonics.
What sings there? – A pleasant bird guide for anyone who wants to learn to recognize birds by their song. This guide covers the songs of the most common garden and park birds. We follow the months of the year.
plastic songs
The first year of life is crucial for songbirds: then the young bird masters singing. By listening to peers and practicing. Let’s take the tick as an example. The finch beat is not the most complex song and therefore easy to analyze. We too can clearly hear the differences between the stages of the chaffinch’s learning process. Already after a few weeks, until autumn, the young chaffinch starts to sing; this first exercise is called subsong in English. Finches don’t sing in winter.
When the days start to lengthen and the hormones start to play up under the influence of this, the finches start to sing in February. In beech forests with many hibernating finches you hear them everywhere, very often it doesn’t seem like anything. However, the young chaffinch learns quickly and in March the practice singing has already developed to such an extent that it now sounds much better. This stage is called plastic song. In April the vocals have completely crystallized and you can hear the familiar finch strike everywhere, including the swipe at the end.
Some species continue to learn and develop their song. Just like the starling, the absolute maestro when it comes to the complexity of song. This blackcap continues to learn in the following years. Just like our nightingale and other songbirds.
And, to take a side trip to the crooked beaks: it’s amazing what you can teach a parrot and some species of parakeets, both in song and in words. But beos, magpies and jackdaws are also masters of copying and talking.
In short, birds can also teach you a lot.
Listen to the song of all kinds of birds in the Netherlands at vogelaudio.nl
Again a lot of listening pleasure in our nature on behalf of the
Green, Play and Environment working group.