Hi, guys.
I'm a bit like Doctor Doolittle.
I spend my time listening to and having conversations
with birds.
But I don't just figure out what they are
saying, such as food calls-
Leftovers in the tea room!
Or mating calls,
How you doing?
I also look at what extra information is encoded
in the calls, such as the social status, or
group membership.
This is a bit like talking on a telephone.
Hello?
Even if you don't recognize the caller, you
generally have some idea on whether or not
the caller is a male or female, or a child
or adult.
Studying this extra information gives us some
idea about how some animal societies work,
and where animals get their information from.
And for an animal, this information may mean
the difference between life and death.
I study apostlebirds living in the Australian
outback.
Life is hard, and these birds deal with it
by being social.
They live in groups and help raise offspring
that are not their own.
Like humans, they are selective to who they
help: family and unrelated group members.
But how does a bird know who its relatives
or group members are?
Well, apostlebirds are seriously chatty birds.
So, I recorded these birds in the field and
identified over 17 different calls.
And not all calls seem to carry extra information.
Some calls, like alarm clicks, all sound the
same regardless of which bird made the call.
This makes sense, because when it comes to
the risk of being killed or eaten, it really
doesn't matter who screams "predator!"
However in a different call, such as those
that are recorded daily group interactions,
it may pay to be able to recognize individuals
or differentiate between birds that are in
your group or in a different group.
So in these types of calls, calls from different
individuals sound very different.
And these differences may encode extra information
on the callers individual identity or group
membership.
And finally, I talk to the birds by playing
the recorded calls back to them, which is
my way of asking them questions like: can
you tell the difference between a call from
a group member or a stranger?
And so like Doctor Doolittle, I'm actually
talking with the animals to discuss not just
what they are saying, but what else they may
know.
My name is Miya Warrington and I recently
finished my Ph.D. at Macquarie University
in Sydney in the Avian Behavior and Ecology
Lab and the title of my thesis is, "The Effect
of Genetic Structure and Social Networking
on the Acoustic Communication of Cooperative
Breeding Apostlebirds."
