Scientists Teach Sparrows a Song That Vanished Decades Ago
Scientists Are Teaching Birds to Sing Lost Songs
In a Buenos Aires park, a rufous-collared sparrow song last heard in the 1960s had disappeared. Researchers reconstructed it from hand-drawn annotations, played a computer-generated version, and within three months a local bird began copying parts of it. The work suggests synthetic recordings could tutor endangered songbirds whose populations have declined too far to learn from each other.
When people talk about biodiversity, we're always talking about genes, about genetic material. But animals' learned behavior or culture, such as birdsong, is also an essential part of their population.