Bird Song Discoveries May Lead To Refinement Of Darwinian Theory

One of her projects is to record and map out the Rosetta stone
songs of Savannah sparrows that spend the warmer months on a small Canadian island, Kent Island, in the Bay of Fundy. With the help of microphones, binoculars, and a well-documented set of individual birds, her research is beginning to create a richer view of how birdsong moves from neighbor to neighbor and generation to generation in the wild. And it could lead to a refined way of looking at how communication fits into evolutionary theory.Using sound to communicate is common to many animal species, but learning different ways to use the tools physiology gave them to create more complex means of communication is rare. Human language is the most obvious example, but we alone among primates are capable of vocal learning (though other kinds of mammals including dolphins, whales, and a few species of bats and seals do learn their vocalizations). On the other hand, over 5,000 species of birds learn their songs.Previous generations of birdsong researchers have shown that birds learn their songs in ways very similar to the ways human infants learn language. They start with a period of close listening, followed Rosetta Stone Spanish
by a subsong phase akin to human babbling, as they work out the phonemes they can physically make and map the sounds to the motor skills it takes to make them, to calibrate the vocal instrument, as Prof. Williams puts it. After that comes the plastic song phase, when they begin to put the parts together in imitation of models they've heard, and a crystallization period when they settle on a tune that works.Since 2004, Prof. Williams has made several trips to Kent Island, about an eight-hour drive, followed by a two-hour ferry ride to Grand Manan Island. From there it takes another hour on a lobster boat to reach the island. The island is managed as a scientific research station by Bowdoin College, and has been a protected area for more than 70 years. Many researchers use it as an open-air laboratory to study the island's flora and fauna.One ongoing research effort begun by Nathaniel Wheelwright of Bowdoin College is to catalog the life stories of a broad sample of the Savannah sparrows that summer on the island. Since 1987, thousands of the little birds have been caught, tagged with bands on their legs, and had their blood sampled. The result is a rich census of the island's sparrow population, with detailed information about the birds' life-span, mating habits, and territorial awareness.There are other multi-year studies of birds, Williams Rosetta Stone Spanish (Latin America) Levev 1-5
said. But not many have accumulated this kind of longevity and this breadth of approaches.In some ways, it can seem like a very complicated episode of Melrose Place. One particular long-lived male is known as S.RN, so-called because his left leg has a striped band, and his right leg a red band over a navy blue one. In 2004, he mated with five different females, and raised 20 nestlings. Subsequent blood work revealed that only 16 of them were actually his offspring (he didn t lose much overall, because he fathered at least five that hatched in other males nests).