Bustamante, N.; Garitano-Zavala, Á. Natural Patterns in the Dawn and Dusk Choruses of a Neotropical Songbird in Relation to an Urban Sound Environment. Animals2024, 14, 646.
Bustamante, N.; Garitano-Zavala, Á. Natural Patterns in the Dawn and Dusk Choruses of a Neotropical Songbird in Relation to an Urban Sound Environment. Animals 2024, 14, 646.
Bustamante, N.; Garitano-Zavala, Á. Natural Patterns in the Dawn and Dusk Choruses of a Neotropical Songbird in Relation to an Urban Sound Environment. Animals2024, 14, 646.
Bustamante, N.; Garitano-Zavala, Á. Natural Patterns in the Dawn and Dusk Choruses of a Neotropical Songbird in Relation to an Urban Sound Environment. Animals 2024, 14, 646.
Abstract
Urbanization in one of the more important phenomena affecting biodiversity in the Anthropocene. Some organisms can cope with urban challenges, and changes in birds’ acoustic communication have been widely studied. Although changes in the timing of the daily organization of acoustic communication have been previously reported, there is a significant gap regarding possible variations in song structure between dawn and dusk choruses. Considering that urbanization potentially imposes different soundscapes for the dawn and dusk choruses, we postulate two hypotheses: i) there are “natural” variations in song parameters between dawn and dusk choruses, and ii) such parameters within the city will vary in response to urban noise. We studied urban and extra-urban populations of Chiguanco Thrush in La Paz, Bolivia, measuring for their dawn and dusk choruses: song length, song sound pressure, minimum, maximum, range and dominant frequency, and the proportion of songs produced. The results support our two hypotheses: in natural and urban conditions dawn songs were louder and with larger bandwidths, and within the city, the frequency of the entire song rises along with increasing amplitude. Understanding structural variations between dawn and dusk choruses could allow for better interpretation of how some bird species cope with urban challenges.
Keywords
Behavior; bird song; song frequency; song amplitude; urban ecology; Turdus
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Behavioral Sciences
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
