Birds Have Regional Accents, and New Zealand Yellowhammers Still Sing 19th-Century British Dialects
Do birds have accents? the regional differences in birdsong
Birdsong varies not just between individuals but across regions, with species like the yellowhammer singing distinct dialects. Introduced to New Zealand in the 1860s, yellowhammers there retain seven dialects from southern England that have since vanished in the UK due to population declines. Urban noise and light also push birds to sing higher, faster, and earlier, while female birdsong remains vastly understudied.
In the east of England, 'cheese' has a lower pitch than 'please', and this is reversed in south and west England.
- 317070
I've been birdspotting for the last year (in the UK, there is an addictive app called birdex, which is basically like a pokedex in the pokemon game, except it does birds). I am proud to report that I've observed 110 species this year. The last one was this weekend, where apparently meadow pipits are traveling across London parks while they're heading south.
It's not just regional dialects and individual birds, I am noticing that the time of the year also matters. Tits sound different in spring, summer and autumn, and so do e.g. robins.
It's a hobby I can recommend to everyone. Whenever I am outside now, I can listen for any faint sound and then make a mental note of all the birds I observed.
- sdenton4
We used yellowhammer dialects as one of the tasks in the OG paper on building 'custom' models for species classification on top of embeddings from bird song classifiers:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-49989-z
It was the hardest task (alongside godwit call types, bat species (pitch shifted into the audible range), Marine mammal species, and frog species), but still worked!
- nightshift1
Also interesting:
https://gizmodo.com/a-viral-new-bird-song-in-canada-is-causi...
White-throated sparrows across Canada are rapidly replacing their classic three-note song ending with a new two-note version, which originated in British Columbia and has spread eastward over the past two decades.