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Bird songs can serve as a warning system to detect ecological disturbances Blackwell Publishing release November 30, 2005 Changes in bird song could be used as an early warning system to detect man-made ecological disturbances, new research published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology has found. Although much previous research has focused on bird song and vocal mimicry, this is the first study to analyse the role played by habitat loss and fragmentation on song-matching. According to the study's authors, Dr Paola Laiolo and Dr José Tella of the Estación Biologica de Doñana in Seville, Spain: "We found that habitat loss in the steppe matrix markedly affected song-type sharing mechanisms in Dupont's lark. The occurrence of anthropogenic habitat barriers seems to hinder cultural transmission of song types over distances, resulting in an intensification of the differences between non-neighbours and increasing mimicry between neighbours. This suggests that males from fragmented habitats perceived as rivals only the close neighbours with which they engaged in counter-singing."
Sharing song types - when a male replies to a rival's song with the same song sequence - with neighbours is common in birds, and is thought to act as a threat signal between males, which would explain why birds have evolved such complex song repertoires. The Dupont's lark is a rare and specialised steppe passerine, and its song unit is made up of up to 11 discrete sequences, each sequence being composed of up to 13 notes. The most common sequence is known as the 'whee-ur-wheeee'. To be considered as shared songs in this study, two sequences had to match at least 75% of their component notes and the matching portions had to be similar in note shape, timing and frequency. This story is derived from a Blackwell Publishing Ltd. news release.
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