“It’s really exciting,” says Andrew Farnsworth, an ornithologist with Cornell University.“Having this approach and these findings as a baseline against which to compare a changing reality of habitat fragmentation and loss is really important.” This study is among the first to assess the longevity of song traditions within a bird species, and its findings provide a baseline for scientists to measure the impact of habitat loss on the cultural evolution of songbirds. The song-types that you hear in the marshes of North America today may well have been there 1,000 years ago,” says Lachlan. “With those two ingredients together, you end up with traditions that are really stable. Lachlan says that the combination of the birds’ “conformist bias” and their ability to so precisely mimic their elders allows them to create traditions that persist unchanged for centuries. “We were able to show that swamp sparrows very rarely make mistakes when they learn their songs, and they don't just learn songs at random, they pick up commoner songs rather than rarer songs,” says Robert Lachlan, a biologist at Queen Mary University of London and the study’s lead author. The team reports the findings Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications. Now, scientists suggest that these sparrows preserve their cultural traditions as efficiently as humans do, if not more so. The young sparrows mimic the songs sung by their elders so accurately that their musical repertoire has remained relatively unchanged for all that time. Scientists have discovered evidence that the American swamp sparrow, Melospiza georgiana, has likely been singing the same songs for a millennium. In fact, they haven’t changed their set list in more than 1,000 years, according to a new study.
These little brown birds may know just a few songs, but they know them well.
Every summer, the melodic whistles of thousands of American swamp sparrows echo across North America’s wetlands.
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