New Delhi: On your morning walk or when you open your house windows, you see birds chirping or singing a song. As you continue to walk along the path where the birds are singing, the music feels soothing to the ears. But like humans and other animal species, birds communicate and love to do that. They greet each other with the flapping of wings. Let us understand how birds communicate and what that means.
How do birds communicate?
The voice is the most prominent form of bird communication, and their repertoire of sounds is vast and diverse. From singing, calls, and squeaks to squawks, gurgles, warbles, trills, rattles, gulps, pops, whines, clicks, croaks, drums, whistles, howls, tremolos, thumps, honks, and many more, their communication is a complex and fascinating world.
In a recent breakthrough, a scientist at Northeastern University in London shed light on how birds communicate in groups. For years, behavioural ecologists have studied how one songbird’s message is received by another, focusing on the one-to-one relationship. However, this approach was deemed simplistic when it became evident that a chirping bird’s message resonates with multiple birds in its vicinity.
Scientists from across the world worked on modelling how the birds interact with each other in their or rival flocks simultaneously, to what is known as the higher-order networks.
The scientists used mathematical diagrams and hypergraphs to show how objects can have many connections in one go while in a group.
A similar study was done on North American black-capped chickadees, which created a network to simulate the dawn chorus among this territorial family of birds and illustrate the interactions that occurred during that moment.
Birds on a tree (Photo credit: Maneesh Sharma/500px/Getty Images)
Do all birds use voice for communication?
No, not all birds use their voice as their primary method of communication. Some birds, like the ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), make a non-vocal sound that beats the air with their wings. It is done so that it creates a vacuum, and the sound is caused by the air rushing to fill the space and create a mini-sonic boom. This means that the sound is used to mark their territory.
Another way to communicate is through visual display. These are often a combination of behaviour and the feathers on the bird’s body. Like in the case of blackbirds, the males puff up their feathers, lean forward, shrug their shoulders, and show off their colourful shoulders. They also sing this to make their statement clear. This is how many bird species communicate while displaying both visual and sound-based behaviours to communicate.
Flamingoes (Photo credit: Pratik Bhatt/500px/Getty Images)
As the sun rises and the world is still wrapped in silence, a symphony of bird songs fills the air. It’s not just a pleasant melody to our ears but a complex language of communication among these feathered creatures. Let’s delve into the intriguing ways birds communicate. knowledge Knowledge News, Photos and Videos on General Knowledge
