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Seems like quite a reasonable suggestion and may
well be true, especially as the call is usually given as a duet. However the
number of recordings of the birds that have been made would appear to be
irrelevant. The sample size of just five pairs is nowhere near big enough a
sample on which to base a finding like that.
Philip
OK birdos, here is a topic to get you
going. Is the following
correlation due simply to the fact that the
better singers have better
mates, or perhaps sing better because they are
in better condition, as
opposed to the inference in the following
article?
LK
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0111/06/text/national18.html
Bird
says lead singers get most of the chicks
Date: 06/11/2001
By
Richard Macey
Tristen Bird enjoys nothing better than strumming his
guitar and belting
out a tune.
The aptly named Taronga Zoo keeper
and amateur musician is optimistic he
can help bring endangered birds
back from the edge of extinction by
teaching them to sing
better.
For the past year, Mr Bird and his colleague, Dr Greg
Johnson, of
Adelaide Zoo, studied the vocal talents of Psophodes
olivaceus, better
known as the eastern whipbird, which inhabits the
coastal rainforests of
NSW, Queensland and Victoria.
After taping
about 100 hours of singing by five pairs of eastern
whipbirds in
captivity at Adelaide Zoo, the researchers electronically
analysed the
recordings and made a remarkable discovery.
"The better a bird
sings, the more receptive its mate will be," Mr Bird
said yesterday.
"The birds that breed the most have a greater
vocal
repertoire."
They found that birds with better singing
skills tended to mate more
often and were more likely to produce bigger
clutches of chicks.
The most successful birds appeared to be better
at reaching lower
frequency notes, while the "poorer" singers
seemed to produce higher
frequency calls.
Mr Bird told an
international zookeepers' conference in Sydney yesterday
that it might be
possible to teach poor warblers to sing better - and
boost their breeding
- by playing them recordings of good singers.
If their zoo birds
picked up the tunes and responded by producing more
chicks, the next step
would be trying the technique on the endangered
western whipbirds, which
lived in Western Australia's Tin Can
Bay [Two Peoples Bay??? - TCB is in
Qld].
The singing lessons could be extended to other threatened birds
and
possibly even to teaching endangered mammals how to improve their
mating
calls.
Mr Bird plans to spend the next three years
collecting more recordings
of wild eastern whipbirds, but believes he has
enough to begin the first
whipbird singing classes before the end of the
year. He hopes to splice
together the calls of many whipbirds to produce
an irresistible mating
call.
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