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Study

The Anna's hummingbird chirps with its tail: a new mechanism of sonation in birds

Clark, Christopher J.; Feo, Teresa J.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2008

Peer-reviewedcontrolled laboratory experimentmixed

What they did

Display dives by male Anna’s hummingbirds were filmed at high speed with synchronised sound, individual tail feathers were removed or manipulated, and isolated feathers were tested in a wind tunnel at the airspeeds reached in a dive.

Studied in
Calypte anna
Sample size
male Anna's hummingbirds filmed in display, with tail feathers manipulated and tested in a wind tunnel

What they found

The loud chirp at the bottom of the dive was produced by aeroelastic flutter of the outer tail feathers rather than by the syrinx; removing the relevant feathers removed the sound, and isolated feathers in a wind tunnel reproduced it.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

The dive sound is a mechanically produced sonation from tail feathers, not a vocalisation.

How NatureHQ reads it

Included here because it draws a line the subject needs. Not every sound a bird makes deliberately is a vocalisation, and a sound that is loud, tonal, produced on cue in a display and completely absent from the vocal system is exactly the kind of thing that gets counted as song by accident. The wind-tunnel test is what makes it airtight: a detached feather, held in moving air, makes the noise.

Limitations

  • One species; other hummingbird dive sounds are produced differently and some are vocal.
  • The wind tunnel reproduces the airflow, not the bird, and the contribution of feather interactions in the intact tail is harder to isolate.
  • What females make of the sound is not tested here.

The experiment, explained

  • Putting a single tail feather in a wind tunnel

    Is the loud chirp at the bottom of a hummingbird’s display dive a sound the bird sings, or a sound its body makes?

What this study is used for on NatureHQ

One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.

Finding the paper

Published by: The Royal SocietyPublished by the Royal Society.

doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2007.1619

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.