Culturally transmitted patterns of vocal behavior in sparrows

Male white-crowned sparrow song was recorded across a series of neighbouring populations around San Francisco Bay and analysed spectrographically, then compared against songs produced by birds taken from those populations and raised in the laboratory.

Studied in

Zonotrichia leucophrys

Sample size

wild male sparrows recorded across several San Francisco Bay area populations

Populations only a few kilometres apart sang consistently different song variants, sharp enough that a recording could be assigned to a location by ear. Birds raised without exposure to local song did not develop the local variant.

• The strongest dialect boundaries in this species are unusually crisp; many songbirds show gradual clinal variation instead, and generalising from this case overstates how tidy dialects usually are.
• The original work could not exclude subtle genetic population structure; later work addressed it, but this paper alone does not.
• Male song only. Female song in this species was not systematically examined.

• Birdsong dialects

  Local song variants are learned from local birds, not inherited. Populations a few kilometres apart can sing distinguishably different songs with no genetic difference behind it.

• Birdsong

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