[HN Gopher] What birds listen for in birdsong
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What birds listen for in birdsong
Author : pseudolus
Score : 67 points
Date : 2022-05-02 10:47 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| HPsquared wrote:
| There are two main types of sound, I think. Alarm sounds and
| social sounds.
|
| Alarm sounds indicate the presence of a predator or danger, and
| tend not to give away the position of the source. Think a
| continuous tone, it's hard to pinpoint the location by sound.
|
| "Social" noises on the other hand have a more staccato character
| and allow the hearer to pinpoint the location of the source.
| Swizec wrote:
| I live with a bird (parrot). There are alarm sounds, social
| sounds, and mood sounds.
|
| The alarm sounds are very _very_ loud. You can pinpoint them
| from the other side of the house, possibly the neighborhood.
| Any potential confusion about direction would come solely from
| the immense loudness and sound echoing off walls. The bird
| typically flies away from the location it made those sounds. In
| a smaller room, the sound itself can be incapacitating. It
| overwhelms your senses. I 'm told in the wild those sounds can
| be heard up to a mile away.
|
| The social sounds come in different forms. Everything from loud
| flock calls that were originally designed for isolated members
| of the flock to find each other in a dense jungle with no line
| of sight. These too can travel up to a mile in the wild, but
| they feel more pleasant to the ear. You can tell the bird is
| beckoning you and just making sure you're still within earshot.
| When you're close-by, the social sounds can be quiet womps,
| almost like a conversation. Especially funny when you're on a
| zoom call and the bird thinks you're talking to them. Sometimes
| they're loud sharp beeps. I don't know what those mean but they
| can make your ears ring.
|
| Mood sounds are usually of the quiet wompy kind. Like the bird
| is entertaining itself, or being cozy and muttering to itself
| under its breath. Sometimes the bird gets excited and lets out
| a sharp scream ... this could be social of the "Hey look what I
| got!" variety.
| the_af wrote:
| When I was a teenager I kept birds, though not parrots and
| it's been a long while. (I don't think I could keep caged
| birds anymore, but that's a different can of worms).
|
| What you say matches my experience! It's really funny when
| you hear a bird "muttering" to itself, they almost seem
| human. Also when it gets excited and lets out a loud beep!
| Swizec wrote:
| > I don't think I could keep caged birds anymore, but
| that's a different can of worms
|
| This one lives more like a dog or a cat. Flying around the
| apartment as he pleases. The only time he goes in his cage
| is when it's safer for him (or us, parrots bite when
| displeased).
|
| Funnily he gets very angry when his cage door is closed and
| he's outside ... even though he never goes in there. But he
| _might_ ... he does ask to be caged when it's bed time.
| It's quite endearing.
| wara23arish wrote:
| Does he have free range to shit anywhere? How do you
| control that aspect??
|
| Does he try to run away if a window is open ? Or are they
| similar to outdoor pet cats?
| Swizec wrote:
| The bird we have is a super social species so his
| favorite spot is on your shoulder or inside your shirt.
| He flies away to poop. We were able to potty train him so
| he doesn't poop on us and generally avoids couches, beds,
| and such.
|
| He does poop everywhere else though. Usually in a few
| common spots. Fortunately it doesn't smell and we just
| wipe it with a paper towel.
|
| Training him to poop in sinks had limited success. We
| aren't patient enough.
|
| As for windows, we keep screens on them. He probably
| wouldn't fly away on purpose but when a bird gets spooked
| you never know.
| the_af wrote:
| > _The bird we have is a super social species_
|
| Which bird is it, if I may ask? Just curious.
| Swizec wrote:
| Sun/Jenday Conure. They don't believe in personal space
| yareally wrote:
| Seems to be a conure trait. I have a green cheek that's
| also like that. Won't poop on us (except by accident or
| out of spite), but our budgie really doesn't care where
| he poops.
| erickhill wrote:
| When I had birds that's precisely what they did. Birds
| typically like to be in the highest comfortable place in
| a room for instinctual reasons. In my apartments at the
| time, that meant the tops of virtually any open doors.
| (They also liked company so they'd generally follow me
| from room to room and sit on top of doors along the way.)
| You really don't want ceiling fans...
|
| So, yeah. I made sure there was generally something on
| the floor below them. But the sides of the doors would
| need to be cleaned fairly regularly. I had cockatiels,
| and you couldn't "potty train" them.
|
| Birds also like to chew things sometimes, so you needed
| to keep a close eye on them or realize your damage
| deposit was going to take a hit later.
| nescioquid wrote:
| > One pivotal finding from such work is that birds perform
| surprisingly poorly on recognizing a melody shifted up or down in
| pitch.
|
| I used to assume that the more fundamental mode of pitch
| perception would be intervals (the difference between two
| pitches) rather than absolute pitch perception. It is largely the
| other way around, however, which makes sense -- interval
| perception is based in pitch perception and comparison.
|
| As someone who envies those with absolute pitch, it is still
| surprising to me that this mode of perception is biologically
| more fundamental.
| HPsquared wrote:
| As I understand it the inner ear performs a Fourier transform
| such that each location within in corresponds to a frequency
| detected in the sound.
|
| That way, an interval or chord has a geometric shape plotted
| into the inner ear. The distance between detected points can be
| detected but not their absolute position.
|
| It's probably a bit like how the eye detects objects: you see
| points of light that have set positions _relative_ to each
| other (shape and size of the object), not the "absolute"
| positions in your field of view.
| leephillips wrote:
| The absolute position is known to the brain; the mapping
| between locations on the basilar membrane and in the brain is
| called the tonotopic map. Why this information is only
| available to consciousness in some people is a mystery.
| awinter-py wrote:
| re 'auditory fine structure', humans probably use this stuff too.
| check out 1970s work by smith etc on 'chimeric sounds', a study
| mixing low-frequency temporal envelope + high-frequency signal
| content from different speakers. humans apparently use one part
| for speech, the other for pitch + location.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2268248/
|
| sciam article hints at low harmonics mattering more to finches;
| some birds produce low harmonics via the 'pulse tone register',
| i.e. a mixing property of the dual syrinx. this is why birds
| sometimes sound like they've been run through an 8-bit encoder
| tbm57 wrote:
| I would have liked to see a version of the test where they remove
| one of the symbols altogether, and see if the birds register it
| as different. There might be a gap of understanding as far as
| which songs the birds are reacting to. Pretty interesting study,
| though.
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