Miami Herald March 29, 2018
On a dewy summer morning, Karla Rivera-Cáceres, an ornithology
researcher at the University of Miami, crouched in her usual workspace
–– the tall grasses of Costa Rica’s woodland –– and heard something
unusual.
Rivera-Cáceres studies bird song,
and that day she was listening to the canebrake wren, a brown bird
whose bland appearance (it was once named the “plain wren”) belies an
unusual and extremely complex call.
Canebrake wrens are songbirds,
the subset of species whose calls develop beyond the standard tweet or
chirp into full-fledged ballads –– and within that group they are part
of a somewhat exclusive club: duetting birds.
When two of these wrens
communicate, they weave their songs into an elaborate, Sonny and
Cher-style duet. They warble back and forth, literally finishing each
other’s phrases, with such high coordination that, to an outsider, they
sound like a single voice.
But as Rivera-Cáceres sat listening that morning in 2011, she noticed
something odd about this pair’s effort: their duet was really bad.
The birds were sloppy. They
chirped over each other. They sang the wrong responses and screwed up
the timing. They were young, still inexperienced at singing, and it
showed. As birdsong goes, their act was like a five-year-old belting opera. In the world of bird science, her observation proved huge.
Namely: it demonstrated that
birdsong works even more like language than we think –– that in order to
achieve their Pavarotti-esque exchanges, wrens need to learn a specific
set of social rules which are similar to what humans might call
manners.
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