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By Veronica Beltran

changing tune

B.C. white throated sparrows become trend setters: 20 year study finds birds change tune

Jul 3, 2020 | 6:00 AM

PRINCE GEORGE—A UNBC professor was the lead writer in a sparrow study which found that over a 20 year period one rare sparrow song went viral across Canada, wiping out a historic sparrow song in the process.

“As far as we know, it’s unprecedented,” said senior study author Ken Otter, a biology professor at the UNBC.

“We don’t know of any other study that has ever seen this sort of spread through cultural evolution of a song type.” —Ken Otter, UNBC Professor

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The song travelled more than 3,000 km between the years 2000 and 2019. The study, published in the journal: Current Biology, reports that white-throated sparrows from B.C. to central Ontario ditched their traditional three-note-ending song in favour of a unique two-note-ending variant.

Researchers say they still don’t know what made the new song so compelling to the sparrows mentioning that it is well known that some bird species change their songs overtime but that they usually tend to stay in local populations.

“When I first moved to Prince George in British Columbia, they were singing something atypical from what was the classic white-throated sparrow song across all of eastern Canada.”—Ken Otter, UNBC Professor

In the 1960’s white-throated sparrows across the nation whistled their song which at the time ended in a repeated three-note triplet but come the 1990’s the song had already changed in western Canada, according to Otter.

Otter and his team utilized a large network of citizen scientist birders across North America who had uploaded recordings of the white throated sparrow songs online to track the new ending. Their findings showed that the song wasn’t just popular west of the Rocky Mountains but was spreading quickly east.

“Originally, we measured the dialect boundaries in 2004 and it stopped about halfway through Alberta.”—Ken Otter, UNBC Professor

“By 2014, every bird we recorded in Alberta was singing this western dialect, and we started to see it appearing in populations as far away as Ontario, which is 3,000 kilometers from us,” said Otter.

Otter says that they believed perhaps overwintering grounds were the reason for the song change. “We know that birds sing on the wintering grounds, so juvenile males may be able to pick up new song types if they overwinter with birds from other dialect areas. This would allow males to learn new song types in the winter and take them to new locations when they return to breeding grounds, helping explain how the song type could spread,” Otter says.

Further research found that the overwintering grounds did in fact play a part to the change in tune and that the original tune was completely being replaced by the sparrows new tune.

“In white-throated sparrows, we might find a situation in which the females actually like songs that aren’t typical in their environment. If that’s the case, there’s a big advantage to any male who can sing a new song type.”—Ken Otter, UNBC Professor

Otter and his team are curious to find out if the new tune may be preferred by female birds used to the three note ending song. Otter says that now a new song has appeared in another western sparrow population and are excited to see if this tune to takes over the country.