|
I am not an expert on this subject, but my guess is that a
large proportion of a blackbird's repertoire is learned from the surrounding
background of other families and generations of blackbirds, and that this
'learned' song is to a large measure passed down from generation to
generation.
When a few blackbirds (does anyone know exactly how many?)
were transplanted into an environment (Australia, that is) in which this small
(smallish) group were the only blackbirds, then they were deprived of the
depth and diversity of song that they could otherwise have learnt from a larger
and more concentrated population - in other words, they lost a large part of the
potential vocabulary of their language, because they had no-one to learn it
from.
Regards
Ralph Reid
|
