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Melodies on Wings
| Article
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16207 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1997 |
1,542 Words |
| Author
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Jeffrey Cynx
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On a tree by a river a little tomtit
Sang "Willow, titwillow, titwillow!"
And I said to him, "Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing 'Willow, titwillow, titwillow!'"
--Sir William Gilbert, The Mikado
Although scientific investigations may not alter the plot of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, they can help explain why birds sing. These studies indicate that the little tomtit is employing an extremely complex communication system. Indeed, any reference to songbirds as "birdbrains" may reveal more about the speaker's ignorance than about the birds' intelligence.
To understand birdsong, it's first important to define a songbird and how song differs from other bird vocalizations. Birds, in one form or other, have been around for over 100 million years. Songbirds appeared about 40 million years ago but account for over half of the 10,000 species in existence today. They include robins, canaries, red-winged blackbirds, and song sparrows. Songbirds are a suborder (known as Oscines or Passeres) of the order Passeriformes, which is one of 29 orders of birds.
One of the distinguishing features of songbirds is their ability to learn songs and certain other vocalizations. Song learning also occurs in two other orders of birds: Psittaciformes, which includes parrots, and Apodiformes, which includes hummingbirds. It thus appears that song learning evolved in birds along three separate lineages, but reasons for this remain
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