Study
New insights from female bird song: towards an integrated approach to studying male and female communication roles
Riebel, Katharina; Odom, Karan J.; Langmore, Naomi E.; Hall, Michelle L.
Biology Letters, 2019
Reviews what has been learned since female song was re-established as widespread, covering its functions, how the male-focused framing shaped the questions the field asked, and what changes when song is treated as a trait of both sexes.
- Studied in
- Passeri
- Sample size
- synthesis of the female song literature
Female song is used in territory defence, in resource competition and in coordination with a mate, and several long-standing generalisations about song function hold only for the male-only species the field concentrated on.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Song should be studied as a trait of both sexes; the male-centred framework has systematically constrained hypotheses and interpretation.
How NatureHQ reads it
The follow-through, and the more useful of the two papers for a reader. The 2014 result says the assumption was wrong; this one says what it cost. Because female song was invisible, the standard explanation for song became sexual selection through female choice — a frame in which the female is the audience by definition — and functions like defending a year-round feeding territory, which is what a great deal of female song is actually for, had nowhere to sit.
- A review of a literature that is still young and heavily weighted towards a handful of well-studied tropical and Australian species.
- Function is often inferred from context rather than from playback experiments, which remain scarce for female song.
- Hormonal and neural work on female song lags well behind the equivalent work in males.
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.
Female birdsong
A pair singing in coordinated duet may be defending a territory together — or one of them may be answering to stop a rival getting in. The sound is nearly the same either way.
Published by: The Royal SocietyPublished by the Royal Society.
doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0059
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.