Female Birdsong is finally getting the attention it deserves and here's how you can submit data to help

New research has proven that female birds do Sing. Many field guides say it is only the males that sing and it was a general opinion held by ornithologists, but new studies prove this isn't so. Sexism is a prevalent thing in modern society and in the birding world but it seems sexism even exists with our view on the birds. Field guides state in general that male song is a complex set of vocalizations produced by the males only in breeding season and that any female birdsong is an abberation. This is just factually untrue as the new study proves that song is ancestral in all songbirds and that at least 71% of female birds in 32 families that were studied sing full songs. You can read the updated interesting article on it from April 2017 HERE. You can also read the full research study "Female song is widespread and ancenstral in songbirds" HERE.

Female birds sing a lot more than we ever thought and scientists are collecting data and are calling citizens to submit their reports and recordings in a citizen science project. You can learn more about the project and why they need the data and how to submit the data HERE.

Audubon wrote an article on this topic a few days ago, which you can read HERE.

You may be interested to know that in the ABA alone, 120 species of female birds sing!





Comments

  1. Viktor VandereykAugust 24, 2017 at 9:52 PM

    That's really cool!! always new things to be discovered. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete

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