Abstract
During the dawn chorus, territorial male songbirds vocalise intensively within signalling range of several conspecific males and can therefore be considered members of a busy communication network. The more or less continuous singing over a long period of time under standardised stimulus conditions makes the dawn song a potentially important information source both for simple receivers and for eavesdroppers. Male blue tits (Parus caeruleus) vary in features of their dawn song, e.g. older males sing longer strophes, and females choose males that sing longer strophes as extra-pair partners. However, so far, dawn song in the blue tit has been investigated separately from other singing behaviour of the same males. In this study, we investigate aspects of blue tit male quality, reflected in dawn song characteristics, and their predictive value for how males behave during singing interactions later in the morning. We acted as simple receivers by recording the singing activity of one male at a time at dawn and compared features of its dawn song, such as onset before sunrise, repertoire size, mean bout length, strophe length and percentage performance time to responses of the same male to a territory intrusion simulated by playback of synthesised songs later during the same morning. We assume that an aggressive response towards an intruder will involve a fast approach to the loudspeaker broadcasting strophes of blue tit song, searching for the intruder (flying around), and a high amount of counter singing and overlapping of the intruder’s songs. Aspects of vigour of response to the simulated intrusion could be predicted from all five investigated dawn song parameters as well as male age. This is, to our knowledge, the first indication that a simple receiver could extract reliable information from a male’s dawn singing behaviour about its competitiveness later in the day.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Hans Winkler from the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Comparative Ethology, Vienna for continuous support during this study. We are grateful to Bart Kempenaers from the Research Centre for Ornithology for logistic support and Agnes Tuerk for invaluable help in the field. Raphael-Thomas Klumpp and Alfred Fojt from the institute of Silviculture, Vienna, provided access to their facilities in the study area. We thank Christian Schlögel for excellent help with song recordings and Ronald Smetacek for technical assistance. We are grateful to Thorsten Balsby for fruitful discussions, statistical advice and comments on the manuscript and to two anonymous referees whose comments improved the manuscript. The Danish National Research Foundation and the Centre for Sound Communication supported this study. The research was conducted in accordance with the laws in Austria and Denmark.
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Poesel, A., Dabelsteen, T. & Pedersen, S.B. Dawn song of male blue tits as a predictor of competitiveness in midmorning singing interactions. acta ethol 6, 65–71 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-004-0086-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-004-0086-0