Culture and cultural evolution in birds: a review of the evidence

Reviews evidence for socially transmitted behaviour in birds across song, foraging, migration and nest construction, and assesses which cases meet the standards required to call a behavioural difference cultural rather than genetic or environmental.

Studied in

Aves

Sample size

synthesis of avian social learning and cultural transmission studies

Song is by a wide margin the best-evidenced avian culture, with experimental support from tutoring, isolation and population-level tracking. Non-vocal traditions are established in a smaller number of systems, most robustly through the seeded puzzle-box experiments in great tits.

• A review, dependent on the quality of the studies it aggregates.
• The criteria for calling a behaviour cultural are contested, and different authors would include or exclude different cases.
• Song is over-represented partly because it is easy to record, which is a bias in the evidence base as well as a strength.

• Birdsong dialects

  A new song ending appeared in western Canada and replaced the old one across the continent in about twenty years — a cultural change tracked as it happened.

• Birdsong

  The strongest case for culture in any animal is not a primate or a whale. It is a sparrow.