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Do birds have accents? the regional differences in birdsong

68 points · 15 comments · bryanrasmussen

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Zestymarble45 · 1789914918 · focus · HN ↗
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317070 · 1789918208 · focus · HN ↗
I've been birdspotting for the last year (in the UK, there is an addictive app called birdex, which is basically like a pokedex in the pokemon game, except it does birds). I am proud to report that I've observed 110 species this year. The last one was this weekend, where apparently meadow pipits are traveling across London parks while they're heading south.
It's not just regional dialects and individual birds, I am noticing that the time of the year also matters. Tits sound different in spring, summer and autumn, and so do e.g. robins.
It's a hobby I can recommend to everyone. Whenever I am outside now, I can listen for any faint sound and then make a mental note of all the birds I observed.
swozey · 1789918811 · focus · HN ↗
I didn't grow up near ravens but I'm sure I've encountered them in my life plenty of times, except now I'm traveling around Oregon/Washington forests and I can't tell you how many times I thought some drunk people were arguing or screaming in camp and it was just the ravens
1. bethekidyouwant · 1789921008 · focus · HN ↗
  Use seek to identify plants/animals
2. tlavoie · 1789921408 · focus · HN ↗
  Try an app called Merlin, from Cornell University. It's excellent, and basically runs against a regional machine learning model to identify birds.
initramfs · 1789919684 · focus · HN ↗
ofa coursa birds have-a accents!
1. AdamN · 1789920238 · focus · HN ↗
  Funny enough you're doing an Italian/Brooklyn accent but the example I was thinking of is birds that mimicked the car alarms in Brooklyn in the 90s/00s and I'm wondering if they still do that now that alarms aren't as common.
  1. initramfs · 1789927669 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNG-xrnaSE4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNG-xrnaSE4 i remember
sdenton4 · 1789919940 · focus · HN ↗
We used yellowhammer dialects as one of the tasks in the OG paper on building 'custom' models for species classification on top of embeddings from bird song classifiers: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-49989-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-49989-z
It was the hardest task (alongside godwit call types, bat species (pitch shifted into the audible range), Marine mammal species, and frog species), but still worked!
Kim_Bruning · 1789921083 · focus · HN ↗
I really appreciate seeing more ethology stories on HN!
beardyw · 1789924209 · focus · HN ↗
Wood pigeon s don't say "my toe bleeds Be-tty". They say "I know I'm pretty". That's according to Chris Packham so it's true.
1. renyicircle · 1789926720 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
NooneAtAll3 · 1789925401 · focus · HN ↗
something I wondered for a while - do DOGS have accents?
is body language of indian dog the same as brazilian dog?
1. krapp · 1789925819 · focus · HN ↗
  We do know that whales have distinct regional dialects.I would assume that any animal complex enough to have aspects of their behavior not entirely determined by genetics (in other words, taught by parents or peers) exhibits regionally distinct behavior. So yes, dogs probably have "accents." Naively, it seems like it would be weird if they didn't.
nightshift1 · 1789927892 · focus · HN ↗
Also interesting: <a href="https://gizmodo.com/a-viral-new-bird-song-in-canada-is-causing-sparrows-t-1844245103" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/a-viral-new-bird-song-in-canada-is-causi...
dkga · 1789942492 · focus · HN ↗
Beautiful. An interesting tidbit some here may like: for some birds, their songs carry over genetically. As a result, there are no dialects in the same sense as described in this page. The most famous example (at least in the Americas) is Pitangus sulphuratus (known in Brazil as "bem-te-vi"). This bird is present from Southern US until Southern Argentina, and has virtually the same song all over. In fact, I know I arrived in Brazil when I get out of the airport, anyone in the country, and catch a (sometimes clear, sometimes faint) "bem-te-vi, bem-te-vi" song.
hackersnooze1 · 1789950542 · focus · HN ↗
Sometimes a bird species will get split into subspecies based purely on differences in song. There is a big movement to reorganize a lot of taxonomic clades based on genetics rather than phenotypical traits. I wonder if that will change this.

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