WORLD SCIENCE
WORLD SCIENCE
"Long Before It's In the Papers"
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Posted
July
31, 2004
Special to World
Science
Songbirds
whose
sweet
tittering
wakes
us
up
in
the
morning
may
have
an
unexpected
use
for
their
"dawn
chorus":
spying
on
rivals.
Songbirds who lack their own territory use the daily chorus of singing to gather intelligence on their rivals' control of property, researchers propose.
Writing in the May issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, they report that male songbirds—outfitted with radio tags that let researchers track them, and placed in a new area—made long excursions to check on their new rivals during the dawn.
Later in the day they settled down.
The birds "do quite the same thing as birdwatchers usually do when they investigate territory numbers in a songbird population: just counting the singing males during the hour before sunrise, because at that time of the day one can be quite sure that everybody sings," says the lead researcher, Valentin Amrhein, who is affiliated with the University of Basel in Switzerland.
—EJL
WORLD SCIENCE
"Long
Before It's In the Papers"