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The Bird Dawn Chorus Revisited

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Coding Strategies in Vertebrate Acoustic Communication

Part of the book series: Animal Signals and Communication ((ANISIGCOM,volume 7))

Abstract

The bird dawn chorus has fascinated humans since ancient times, but still today numerous questions remain unclear. This chapter will explore this puzzling phenomenon, a communal display that likely involves the highest level of sound complexity found among animal signals. Covering from the first descriptive studies to recent multidisciplinary approaches, we review the physiological, behavioural and environmental factors affecting dawn chorus. In addition, we provide a critical assessment of the supporting evidence for the functional hypotheses proposed so far to disentangle its proximal and ultimate causes. We find that, despite the latest empirical and theoretical studies, there is still a good degree of confusion, and that four out of the nine hypotheses proposed so far in the literature have not been empirically tested. We show that most of these hypotheses are not incompatible with each other, and that their explanatory value changes depending on the species and the season. We argue that, at any rate, a single explanation may not be a reasonable expectation. The best-supported hypotheses for early singing provide three complementary lines of explanation: (1) singing at dawn has a relatively low energetic cost, most likely because it does not interfere with feeding; (2) is optimal to manipulate female mating or settle territory boundaries; and (3) may promote a handicap mechanism that prevents dishonest signalling. Thus, it follows that a combination of hypotheses based on both an optimality standpoint and costliness assumptions is needed to understand the phenomenon. We provide a series of specific suggestions for further research to refine our knowledge of this intriguing aspect of animal behaviour.

Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring:

The Lark, sitting upon his earthy bed, just as the morn

Appears, listens silent, then, springing from the waving corn-field, loud

He leads the Choir of Day—trill! trill! trill! trill!

William Blake (Milton: a Poem, 1810)

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Peter Slater, Barbara Helm, Marc Naguib, John Hutchinson, Valentin Amrhein, Constantino Macías, Thierry Aubin and Nicolas Mathevon for their insightful comments on previous versions of this review. Thiago Bicudo kindly provided the Brazilian data for Fig. 3.1. DL acknowledges post-doctoral study grants by the Fondation Fyssen (France) and the Comunidad de Madrid (Atracción de Talento Investigador, 2016-T2/AMB-1722, CAM, Spain). DG research was supported during the writing of this review by research grant CGL2017-83843-C2-1-P from the Spanish Ministry for Science, and DL research by grant CGL2017-88764-R from the Spanish Ministry for Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ecología Evolutiva, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

    Diego Gil

  2. Departamento de Ecología, Terrestrial Ecology Group, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), Madrid, Spain

    Diego Llusia

  3. Centro de Investigación en Biodiversidad y Cambio Global (CIBC-UAM), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Diego Llusia

  4. Departamento de Ecologia, Laboratório de Herpetologia e Comportamento Animal, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG), Goiânia, GO, Brazil

    Diego Llusia

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  1. Equipe Communications Acoustiques Neuro-PSI, CNRS UMR9197, University Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France

    Thierry Aubin

  2. Equipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle, ENES/CRNL, CNRS UMR5292, INSERM UMRS1028, University of Lyon, Saint-Etienne, France

    Nicolas Mathevon

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Gil, D., Llusia, D. (2020). The Bird Dawn Chorus Revisited. In: Aubin, T., Mathevon, N. (eds) Coding Strategies in Vertebrate Acoustic Communication. Animal Signals and Communication, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39200-0_3

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