Study
Female song is widespread and ancestral in songbirds
Odom, Karan J.; Hall, Michelle L.; Riebel, Katharina; Omland, Kevin E.; Langmore, Naomi E.
Nature Communications, 2014
Presence or absence of female song was scored for over a thousand songbird species from the literature and from field guides, and the trait was mapped onto a songbird phylogeny to reconstruct its state in the common ancestor.
- Studied in
- Passeri
- Sample size
- 1141 songbird species scored for the presence of female song
Female song was recorded in roughly seventy per cent of the species surveyed, and ancestral state reconstruction indicated that female song was present in the common ancestor of songbirds and has been lost repeatedly rather than gained.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Female song is the ancestral condition in songbirds; the male-only pattern familiar from temperate species is a derived and repeatedly evolved loss.
How NatureHQ reads it
The paper that reverses the default. "Only male birds sing" was never a finding — it was an artefact of where the science was done, because song research grew up in temperate Europe and North America where male-only song is genuinely common, and the tropics, where most songbirds live and where female song is ordinary, were barely sampled. Reconstructing the trait on the tree shows the familiar case is the exception. It is also a clean example of how a sampling bias becomes a textbook fact: nobody asserted that females cannot sing, they simply wrote about the birds outside the window.
- Scoring relies heavily on published descriptions and field guides, which under-report female song precisely because observers did not expect it — so the seventy per cent is probably an underestimate rather than an overestimate.
- "Female song" is scored as present or absent and covers a wide range of structure, frequency and function.
- Ancestral state reconstruction is a model-based inference and depends on the phylogeny and the transition model used.
Asking the family tree whether female birds used to sing
Is male-only song the normal condition in songbirds, or is it the exception that happened to be studied?
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Female birdsong
Female birds sing, in most songbird species that have been looked at, and the common ancestor of songbirds almost certainly did too. Male-only song is the exception that got studied.
Female birdsong
Several textbook facts about birdsong are facts about temperate northern songbirds, because that is where nearly all of the research was done.
Published by: Nature PortfolioPublished in a Nature Portfolio journal.
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.