A ‘viral’ new bird song in Canada is causing sparrows to change their tune | Hacker News Reader

A ‘viral’ new bird song in Canada is causing sparrows to change their tune

gizmodo.com

291 pointsOsiris3093 comments

Original journal: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)...

Watch the video at the bottom. It says:

> A hypothesis suggests that, female birds may habituate to the common songs over time, and that drives the male bird to adopt novel songs to maintain female's interest.

Here's a bird singing pirate of Caribbean tune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpR8BeLR_Q

Another singing Adam's family reunion tune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD_tPNYgy58

And finally Star wars Darth Vader tune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjoCi04Rxwg

I have a speaker in my garden that plays bird songs to the birds, recorded from those same birds. They interact with the 'birds' in the speaker by singing back to them. I'm curious if I could infect those birds with new songs by editing those recordings.

That may be harmful to some birds, FYI. Among wildlife photographers, playing bird calls is sometimes considered unethical as it can interfere with their natural behavior, cause stress responses, interfere with mating activity, etc.

Guide from Audubon on using calls: https://www.audubon.org/news/how-use-birdcall-apps

I've on occasion been sitting on my deck reading, while numerous birds are there eating the seeds and peanuts I put out on the deck rail for them and the squirrels.

A few times I've played bird sounds from Cornell's "Merlin" app [1] for them from my iPad. So far I've not got any response at all that I could detect.

I've tried playing sounds from the same species, including alarm or distress calls, and I've tried playing calls from their predators such as hawks that are known to be in this area.

I wonder if the iPad is just not high enough fidelity to fool them?

PS: if it worked I wasn't going to keep doing it. I just wanted to see if they would be fooled by my iPad. Obviously I don't actually want to scare the birds away--if I didn't mind birds I wouldn't be putting out food for them in the first place.

[1] https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

The level of response is going to depend a lot on the type of call and time of year. Playing a song to a bird that's on territory during the breeding season will often elicit a very aggressive response. Of course, this assumes you're playing a call from the same species. A Song Sparrow likely isn't likely going to care about a White-Crowned Sparrow song, for instance.

One trick birders use to elicit a response from birds is "pishing," [0] which imitates a lot of species scolding calls and gets other birds to come check out the perceived threat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRvdhovTgRo

Note that these are all cockatiels, very intelligent parrots that will readily pick up and replay sounds they hear. This is quite distinct from sparrows and most songbirds, which only seem to pick up certain songs.

Even more fascinating, in my opinion, are Lyrebirds [0]. They have been observed the imitate artificial (human-made) sounds such as those of camera shutter, chainsaws [1], and construction work [2].

Not only do I find it impressive that they're capable of producing these kinds of sounds, but probably much more the necessary memory-recall for this. Birds have rather little brain-mass after all, so they must have some excellent way of 'sampling', distinguishing, and storing auditory stimuli.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrebird

[1] https://youtu.be/VjE0Kdfos4Y?t=104

[2] https://youtu.be/C0ZffIh0-NA

I expect that, sometime before I die, there will be a clip of a lyrebird doing a David Attenborough narration of a clip of a lyrebird imitating David Attenborough marvelling at some sound that a lyrebird is making.

Yet more evidence of Dangerous Memes, if one presumes as a result of imitating a chainsaw, our Lyrebird is disadvantaged in reproduction.

https://www.susanblackmore.uk/chapters/dangerous-memes-or-wh...

And if you can't sing, you can dance:

https://www.sciencealert.com/snowball-the-dancing-cockatoo-h...

These are parrots. While technically birds, they are very known to have incredible voice capabilities.

Ravens can talk really well, and are incredibly smart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d3dOam9Hg4

Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”

Some more for the heck of it:

iPhone ringtone:

https://vimeo.com/247872788

Chocobo theme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d81qFaoe010

My Neighbor Totoro theme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvYqqjsYE6I

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_level_geolocator -- How they get rough but scientifically useful tracking information from a device small enough to attach to a sparrow leg!

I love this technique! Using a light sensor to measure sunset/sunrise and then calculate the location.

I spent two summers in an apartment in San Francisco that was near the nest of what I assume was a nightingale.

Every night around midnight it would start singing. It would loop through maybe 8 songs. Some of them sounded very much like the local environment. For example one song was pretty much identical to sirens that I would periodically hear.

It would last for an hour or two each night. I don’t know where the bird went the rest of the year. That was almost ten years ago and I still miss falling asleep to that.

We have those in Boston, I always thought they were mockingbirds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhiyxmWI95Q

Yes you’re right. Judging by Wikipedia it seems likely it was a northern mockingbird.

In San Jose we have birds that imitate car alarms. I don't like them at all.

Yes that’s one thing this bird would do. The whole cycle of two or three repetitive sounds from an alarm before moving to another song.

Ages ago, probably during the age of Nokia phones, I heard about some birds (blackbirds I think) adopting popular Nokia ringtones as their call.

Really, I need to hear this!

The Lyrebird from Australia is probably the best at this. It can imitate just about anything - car alarms, other birdsongs, camera shutters, gunshots, etc. etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrebird#Vocalizations_and_mim...

>In San Jose we have birds that imitate car alarms. I don't like them at all.

There's also the 'mower bird' (male ruffled grouse)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0obByQW23k

Related: lyrebirds passing on flute tunes long after the guy who played them died.

https://www.chonday.com/lynibird18/

Back before the iPhone when Nokia was the defacto phone, there were news stories that birds had started to chime the Nokia ringtone or the Nokia sms chime.

Back then I totally believed it, but I’ve grown skeptic, but it looks like it is not completely outlandish.

My mother told me when she was a kid they used to whistle melodies at birds and some repeated them after a while. Especially starlings.

I'm surprised McDonald's haven't tried teaching birds to whistle their melody, free advertising

Except all the work in training the birds...

That part might be cheap. Still gotta feed and house them while they learn.

I remember hearing nokia ringtones sung by birds while waiting for at bus stops in the late 90s

I had an Alcatel One Touch Easy and One Touch Max. Both had high chirpy tones and powerful speakers.

My budgerigar have learnt that I always responded to SMS tone of the phones and started to mimic them when she wanted some time with me. She did them with pinpoint accuracy so, it was impossible to tell whether it was the phone or her.

She also chirped parts of the ringtones for fun. Also we had a tune between us. I'd whistle a specific tune and she'd respond back with the same tune (or vice versa). It was a kind of pinging each other.

That last bit is so cute :)

Thanks. She was very intelligent and very loving. :)

There's a hardware store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn near where I used to live that had a bird in the store, and it frequently did cell phone ring tones, cash registers, etc.

I thought that kind of exact copying was relegated to mockingbirds but this guy just looked like a parrot.

I had a bird fall in love with my phone's alarm ringtone that I was using in the mornings, started singing back to it, and tried dangerously to enter my dryer vent presumably to mate (or "rescue"). When I finally put all that together I realized that I probably was sleeping too far into that ringtone's repetition cycle and that it was definitely time to change ringtones.

Next up: getting birds to sing your advertising jingles

ROTFL, enter nest seeking drone. A small, low powered device with solar panels gets auto-clamped a few feet from nest.

For the first few weeks of life, baby birds hear your tune, driving it deep into their very essence of self.

I am bird, ergo I sing this.

I wonder, if I play this video during a walk in the nearby mountain in Japan, will the song be picked up by the local species? The scientists would have a new mystery on their hands lol!

>if I play this video during a walk in the nearby mountain in Japan

I know you're probably joking here, but since it's an important area of honest lack of knowledge I really want to point: please please don't ever do this everyone. Not just this video specifically but play any bird song at all outside. Many of the guide apps these days for example have collections of bird songs for each species as another aid in identification, and sometimes people play them to try to attract said birds to see them.

But this can genuinely screw things up for a few poor birds and be another pebble of human caused misery added onto species in trouble. Birds use song in part as a gauge for health and thus mating and territory. This is intuitive if you think about it: to produce more, better song requires a strong healthy respiratory system, syrinx and so on. But no bird can match the output of speakers, and recorded song samples are often chosen for being particularly clear and high quality. So if you play it, females may spend their time searching around for this incredible magnificent perfect specimen of birdliness who doesn't exist, and refuse to mate with other males. And other males themselves may just leave the territory.

If you've got a single well fit earphone or something of that order and play at low volume that can work, or else make recordings of the songs then replay them and try to identify them after getting back indoors. But all those songs are just for show and fun, they're an important part of bird life cycles, so please be careful to enjoy them without disrupting them.

Don't worry I was joking, but thank you because I was not conscious of the part when the speaker becomes the unrivaled imaginary male.

In any case if there is any chance of changing the traditional song of bird species, I would feel like this is akin to introducing an alien species on a new continent, and that sounds like a terrible idea, so I would avoid doing that by any means.

Thank you too! I didn't mean to single you out or anything, and I don't think most people who play songs to attract birds have the slightest malicious intentions. They just think they're giving it a call, and once it sees humans it'll leave and forget about it. It's just a matter of education, not everyone realizes it can actually be quite serious, which is why I wanted to bring it up.

It's almost more tragic when someone who truly likes birds and may well advocate for bird-friendly measures and consideration elsewhere accidentally ends up baiting them.

This is similar to what happens with humans. Females will use an app to quickly scroll through a lot of men, but because they are presented with so many options they will gravitate only toward the top tier men. But the top tier men can only be with so many females, so the majority of females will not get the top tier. However, their standards will still be raised and they will not settle for someone lower. So females will continue searching for this perfect specimen of men and refuse to mate with other males. The other males end up leaving the app and revenue is lost.

> males end up leaving the app and revenue is lost

The real tragedy.

Exactly what happened to me throughout all of college. No point even trying with the world this situation has created.

Maybe the more socially responsible thing for developers of these apps to do is only show a limited number of men to pick from, penalize the rankings of high performers, and boost the rankings of poor performers.

What years were you in college? What were the top dating apps then?

graduated a few years ago, tinder and okcupid I think

In the real world people seem to still be reproducing and mating and marrying. So no, this story of women no longer pairing with men due to apps making them picker doesn't ring true.

Human reproduction is below maintenance in most first world countries

Which is presumably due to birth control and other unrelated factors. To back up the claim that women are no longer looking to pair with men due to apps you can't use reproduction statistics.

Tinder is #2 for top grossing app. I don't think revenue is really being lost here.

Why do you exclusively use the term “females” here instead of “women”, while mostly using the term “men” instead of “males” until the end?

I played it for my cat. He really liked it.

You can train starlings to speak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhBaVInb3jI

This is the medium of Brian D Collier's brilliant art project Teach the Starlings http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/html/intro.htm

Wow, that was really impressive.

But your second link is broken. I think it should be:

http://teachstarlings.societyrne.net/introduction.html

This bit is hilarious:

> HOW TO TEACH STARLINGS THEIR NEW CALL

> The first and most simple strategy is to find a starling and shout "Schieffelin" to it.

I have no idea what's "doublet" or "triplet" about the two bird songs. If they just mean the number of notes, it almost seems like they got the labeling backwards.

It’s the phrasing of the notes. The “triplet” ending song goes da, da, da da da, da da da. The “doublet” ending song goes da, da, da da, da da, da da.

Disclaimer: I am not a music theory wizard, but I do play drums.

Rhythm is not these birds strong point, but I can sort of make out a barely-articulated 3rd in not the first one?

Never found a video of killdeer online that sounded anything like the killdeer at my home have sounded like the last 30 or so years.

Now’s your chance to become an obscure YouTube birdsong maven.

Oh I've seen this movie before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontypool_(film)

OK so yours is a bit of a troll, and at some risk of feeding, I'll offer that Pontypool is such a conceptually amazing film, exploring as it does the intersection of language, media, and mortality.

These two phrases... to me they seem like the new one "answers" to the old one.

Maybe it's something to do with it. They're happy they found a "continuation" to the previous phrase.

By now, birds must have developed a low opinion of us hoomans and our "cold-calling" techniques!

We either post mating calls, the bird equivalent of "Singles in your area..." or post danger calls, the bird equivalent of trolling flamebait.

I bet there's a market opportunity for a HN for Birds!

To keep up with the current times, wouldn't it be better to call it a "meme" song?

One does not simply chirp, chirp, chirp with the eagles

Tweet memetic.

So that's what you call a viral tweet.

I have never upvoted with such reluctance.

Carlos!

Maybe this is common, but I just noticed it - I scrolled down a bit on the website, and suddenly it took 5 or 6 Back button clicks to come back here. Each mini-article loads a new URL.. Looks like you're on the same page but seems like you're not. There's something I really don't like about that! If you went right to the bottom, if there is one, it might take dozens of Back clicks to get off the page. Which effectively disables your back button.

I've seen bottomless pages on sites, but they don't usually load a bunch of URLs like that in your history, do they?

I wanted to read the article but couldn't, because they forced some unrelated video up in there which steals my attention completely

And breaks scrolling because it overlays on top of the text.

This is the history.pushState() API in action. I use it on https://theannoyingsite.com to fill the history with entries to effectively disable the back button.

Also, this one is a gem:

window.addEventListener('popstate', () => { window.history.forward() })

Source code here: https://github.com/feross/TheAnnoyingSite.com/blob/master/st...

I don't know if I hate this or love it.

I loved it. I feel like I should get bonus points for killing the DVD bouncing cat by hitting the exit button as it moved around rather than just using Alt-F4...

I cheated for most of the things like that.

I have tiling turned on in my DE, I didn't even realize that things were supposed to be moving until I was almost done.

Damn. That site truly is annoying. It downloads files, does bing searches with... not so nice search terms, etc. Don't click it!

I watched a vid of your The Most Annoying Website talk a while ago. I'm not sure which of the many versions it was:

https://www.google.com/search?q=annoying+site+feross&tbm=vid

Highly recommended! It's very funny, and safer than actually visiting the site, by the sound of it.

Ha, I really appreciate the music choice! Ziad - Elektronik Supersonik for anyone who's wondering.

Ah, the pleasures of browsing the web without javascript! For us, it is a regular article that loads instantly (no cookie warnings nor ads) and does not play tricks with the back button.

However you have to debug 75% of the websites you visit to enable back javascript.

No, not really. They look uglier, but load way faster. They have to keep being indexable so they have to play nice.

Exactly. The vast majority of sites that store text and simple images are perfectly readable without javascript, and the experience is much, much better. In some rare cases, the site does not load at all, and I do not bother to switch javascript on, unless I am really interested in that particular site.

Being a fan of the default browser styles I contend your observation that "bare" sites look uglier. In fact, having a consistent visual style across sites becomes rather agreeable, instead of allowing each site to set up its style.

Well, I too really like the default browser styles. But the problem is that, with JavaScript disabled, a lot of things that would be hidden by Javascript (like menus and things like that) now appear all cluttered at once. That is what I meant by uglier.

>Which effectively disables your back button.

Press the right mouse button on it when you have this problem.

Not sure if it's because of my settings but the back button works as expected on Firefox mobile even after scrolling all the way down in the article.

When I try to read the article on mobile, an unstoppable video fills up 1/3 of my screen. The video is unrelated to the article and has no obvious UX to stop or dismiss.

Gizmodo’s website is fucking stupid. Who comes up with this shit?

The hedge fund placed exec who has been running Gizmodo into the ground for the last year. Part of a larger trend of user-hostile design changes that have caused quite a lot of controversy as they attempt to extract as much value in the short term as they can. Last time they implemented this exact change it only lasted a few days before the writers at most of the Gizmodo sites more or less openly revolted. It resulted in the shut down of the left leaning news site though. I'm wondering whether we'll see a repeat, or if they'll shrug and give up.

What kind of short term value does this kind of stuff extract? Does forcing visitors to watch a video bring ad revenue or something?

Here's an alternate write up: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/02/science/sparrow-bird-song...

It even has audio clips of the two melodies.

Sparrows moved into the neighbourhood this year. We noticed their chirping is incredibly annoying. Turns out it’s the two-chirp version.

For us this sound doesn’t fade into the background because it sounds synthetic or man made. About as annoying as a back up beeper on a truck.

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