White-throated sparrows are ditching their classic song for a new tune
Researchers are tracking a potential new dialect of bird song that has swept rapidly through sparrows throughout North America. (Scott M. Ramsay/)When ornithologist Ken Otter moved to Prince George in northern British Columbia in 1999, he soon noticed that there was something odd about one of the songs the birds in his new home were singing.Otter was used to hearing male white-throated sparrows, which are common across much of North America, whistling a tune that ends with a repeating set of three notes, known as a triplet. But when he and his colleague Scott Ramsay, now at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, listened carefully to recordings of the sparrows in Otter's new home, they couldn't identify the musical trio. They quickly realized that the birds were singing a different variant of the song that ended in a set of two notes called a doublet.Otter, Ramsay, and their colleagues have been...