Song Categories Paper

Birdsong Lab Post-doc Taka Kaluthota, former M.S. student Orlando Medina, and P.I. David Logue’s paper “Quantifying song categories in Adelaide’s warbler (Setophaga adelaidae)” was published in the Journal of Ornithology.  For this paper, we used cluster analysis to categorize song types. Confirming the results of a previous qualitative study, we found that male Adelaide’s warblers use two song categories. Type B songs occur mostly before dawn. During type B singing, males switch song types after every song, and leave little time between songs. Type A singing is the opposite of type B singing: Males sing type A after dawn, with infrequent song type switching and long silent gaps between songs. Interestingly, the two clusters were not well-separated (see figure), so it may be the case that there is a continuous gradation from type B to type A singing styles. We found subtle, but statistically significant, differences between the structures of type A and type B songs. The next step is to try to understand how these two song categories function.