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Male and Female response to playback

Subject: Male and Female response to playback
From: "Kevin J. Colver" <>
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2002 10:30:01 -0600
I seem to remember long ago a comment suggesting that birds responded to
a recording, thus suggesting that the recording was of good quality.
This brings up an interesting field of inquiry-what is the nature of
avian response to the sounds they hear?

A chapter in Catchpole and Slater's "Bird Song, Biological themes and
variations" presents an interesting discussion on the topic.  It appears
that males and females have different discriminating tastes when it
comes to song they hear.  

Females have all their reproductive eggs in one basket, so to speak,
thus they are very careful and discriminating in listening and
responding to song.  They are more sensitive to poor quality and
defective songers.  It is important that they choose the best quality
singer available.  Males, on the other hand, need to chase off every
rival including rookie singers and even imitators such as mockingbirds.
Thus they will respond to almost anything that sounds even close to a
conspecific song.  I presume therefore that female response to playback
would be a better indicator of the quality of the recording than would
male response.  (And this discussion will refer largely to songbirds,
there is great variation among species even in this group.)

The issue is further clouded by the fact that almost every song the
birds hear in the wild is already degraded by distance and environmental
factors.  The birds are programmed to respond to degraded sound.
Indeed, they can discriminate the degree and quality of song degradation
to extract information on how far away and what direction the singer is
located.

Thus the fact that a bird responds to playback is only a very crude
assay of the quality of a recording.

Greetings to all,

Kevin J. Colver
114 North Clark Lane
Elk Ridge, UT  84651
801-423-1810





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