The learning of song patterns by birds, with especial reference to the song of the chaffinch Fringilla coelebs

Chaffinches were hand-reared under different acoustic conditions — some in complete isolation, some in groups of isolates, some exposed to recorded chaffinch song at various ages — and the songs they produced as adults were recorded and compared with normal wild song using the newly available sound spectrograph.

Studied in

Fringilla coelebs

Sample size

hand-reared chaffinches across rearing conditions

Isolated birds produced song of roughly normal length and pitch range but without the phrase structure and terminal flourish of wild song. Birds exposed to recorded song during their first year reproduced its detail. Groups of isolates reared together converged on a shared abnormal song.

• One species, and a temperate northern songbird with a short, stereotyped song — close to the easiest possible case.
• Hand-rearing in acoustic isolation is a far poorer environment than any wild bird experiences, so the result bounds what is necessary rather than describing what normally happens.
• Sample sizes are small by modern standards and the analysis is qualitative comparison of spectrograms.

• Raising a bird somewhere there is nothing to copy

  Is a bird’s song inherited, or does it have to hear another bird to produce it?

• Birdsong

  Almost everything said about "birdsong" applies only to song, which is a long learned performance — not to calls, which are short, largely innate and used by both sexes all year.

• How birds learn to sing

  A songbird raised where it can hear no other bird still sings — but it sings something structurally wrong, because the specific pattern has to be learned from an adult.