Bird Species Communicates by Fluttering Its Wings -- And They Have Different Accents
(CN) — Scientists have discovered two distinct subspecies of fork-tailed flycatchers that communicate with each other by producing a high-pitched frequency with their feathers — and exhibit regional “accents” while talking to each other.
In this study, published Tuesday in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology, researchers observed these birds mid-flight and recognized that those from the same migration patterns communicated most similarly. They seemed to exhibit different sounds depending on these patterns, as if speaking in “dialects” between possible subspecies.
“We already knew from past genetic analysis that the two groups are becoming different species, so we wanted to know if there were any differences in the sounds that the males produce with their wings,” said lead-author Valentina Gómez-Bahamón, a researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum and a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We not only confirmed the way that these birds make sounds with their feathers, but that the sounds are different for the two subspecies.”
Although it’s not uncommon for birds to communicate with each other by flapping their wings to make a desired noise, this was a particularly fascinating discovery because the two subspecies are in the process of separating, a phenomenon called speciation. This can occur for a number of reasons, including physical barriers like mountain ranges or human intervention, but for the flycatchers it has to do with the massive geographical area they inhabit.
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