Study
Open-ended song learning in a hummingbird
Araya-Salas, Marcelo; Wright, Timothy F.
Biology Letters, 2013
Individually marked long-billed hermits at a lek were recorded repeatedly across years, and changes in the songs of individual adults were tracked against changes in the songs of their neighbours.
- Studied in
- Phaethornis longirostris
- Sample size
- marked long-billed hermits followed across years at a lek
Adult birds changed their songs after their first year, and the changes tracked shifts in the local shared song type rather than being idiosyncratic drift.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Song learning in this hummingbird is open-ended: adults continue to modify song to match their social neighbourhood.
How NatureHQ reads it
Hummingbirds are one of only three bird groups in which vocal learning has been demonstrated, and this establishes that at least one of them keeps learning as an adult — putting it with canaries and starlings rather than with zebra finches. The lek is what makes the result interpretable: males sing in close acoustic contact with the same neighbours across years, so a change that tracks the neighbourhood is hard to explain as anything but copying.
- One lekking species; hummingbirds are a very large family and vocal behaviour varies widely across it.
- Observational — no tutoring or removal experiment was run.
- Tracking marked individuals in the wild gives modest sample sizes.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Vocal learning
Learning to produce new sounds is rare. It turns up in a handful of unrelated groups — songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds, some whales and bats, humans — and each appears to have arrived at it separately.
Vocal learning
Hummingbirds are the third group of birds that learn their sounds — and at least one species carries on changing its song throughout adult life to match its neighbours.
Published by: The Royal SocietyPublished by the Royal Society.
doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2013.0625
Checked against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-02.