by Kiki Edmark (CLAS Bio ’24)

Songs and calls are important modes of communication for birds. They use them to convey information about a wide variety of topics including threats, food, and mating. How birds communicate and how their communication has evolved interests me deeply. I hope to study alarm calls in Carolina chickadees, black-capped chickadees, and their hybrids this summer. When I was asked to choose a journal article and lead a discussion about it for lab, I wanted to explore one that would be relevant to my future research. I chose Salis et al. (2021). In this journal article, the authors investigated whether Great Tits would respond to whole mobbing calls and isolated parts of mobbing calls made by Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus).

The researchers studied Great Tits that lived around Lyon, France, in April of 2019. I thought that the methods the researchers used to identify birds was interesting and certainly not how I thought they would have done it. Instead of PIT tagging birds, they took precautions to ensure that the same bird was not recorded twice by traveling down different paths. For their experiment, the identity of individual birds was not as important as the overall responsiveness of the birds. I, and others in the lab discussion, think that PIT-tagging the birds would only improve the credibility of their study as it would ensure that no bird is recorded twice and that all birds in the area would be accounted for. It is possible that there were male Great Tits in the area that did not respond at all to the recordings and that data should be included in the research. If correct, the researchers could have grossly overestimated the reaction response of great tits to calls from Black-capped Chickadees. Along the same logic, it is also possible that the Great Tits that responded were bolder, and the timider birds did not call or respond as animatedly and were not included in the research, this would cause the researchers to underestimate the responsiveness. Using PIT-tagging would make sure that every bird was accounted for, and that the data are more accurate.

Overall, the researchers found that Great Tits did respond to the whole mobbing sequence as well as the isolated introductory and D notes. The Great Tits responded more frequently to their own mobbing call than to the Black-capped Chickadee’s mobbing call. The evidence does still suggest that Great Tits can understand that the Black-capped Chickadee call signals a threat. During our lab meeting, we discussed how this article could relate to our research. I asked the lab if they thought that the birds we study, Black-capped Chickadees and Carolina Chickadees, would respond in a similar way to a Great Tit mobbing call. While we do not know for sure, we surmised that they would be able to identify the Great Tit mobbing call as an alarm call and would respond to it like the Great Tits responded to the Black-capped Chickadee alarm call. This research is important because it helps us better understand the fundamentals of how birds communicate and how it has evolved. In addition, understanding what parts of the call elicit a response from other birds will deepen my understanding of the research I will be conducting this summer. 

Literature Cited

Salis, A., J.-P. Léna, and T. Lengagne. 2021. Great Tits (Parus major) adequately respond to both allopatric combinatorial mobbing calls and their isolated parts. Ethology 127:213–222