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Study

Regional dialects in the contact call of a parrot

Wright, Timothy F.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 1996

Peer-reviewedfield observationwild

What they did

Contact calls were recorded from yellow-naped amazon roosts across a large part of the species’ Costa Rican range and analysed spectrographically for structural variation between and within regions.

Studied in
Amazona auropalliata
Sample size
yellow-naped amazon roosts recorded across Costa Rica

What they found

Calls fell into a small number of regionally distinct types with sharp boundaries between them, and birds within a region shared call structure closely regardless of roost.

What it means

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

How the authors put it

The species has regional vocal dialects in its contact calls, structured geographically rather than by roost membership.

How NatureHQ reads it

Extends dialects beyond songbirds and does it in a call rather than a song, which matters: parrots have no song in the songbird sense, and their vocal learning shows up in the calls that coordinate a flock. The sharpness of the boundaries is the striking feature — a bird can be assigned to a region from a recording — and it makes parrots a third independent case of geographically structured vocal culture alongside songbirds and cetaceans.

Limitations

  • Observational; cultural transmission is inferred from the pattern rather than demonstrated by tutoring or translocation.
  • A single species over a limited part of its range.
  • The functional significance of the boundaries — whether birds treat a foreign dialect differently — is addressed by later work, not by this study.

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Finding the paper

Published by: The Royal SocietyPublished by the Royal Society.

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