Editorial: Let's sing a song about statistical models

Editorial: Fitness Costs and Benefits of Female Song

The complexity and musicality of birdsong has fascinated naturalists for centuries. However, the historical research focus on temperate northern hemisphere birds has led to a widespread perception that song production is the domain of males alone. More recently, studies of birdsong have undergone a major paradigm shift, with the discovery that song in female birds is in fact widespread and ance...

A brain of her own: a neural correlate of song assessment in a female songbird.

The song control region in the avian forebrain is a series of discrete, interconnected nuclei mediating song learning and production. It has been studied in males or in species where both sexes sing. Little is known about the neural correlates of song perception in nonsinging females, often the intended recipients of song. We studied cowbirds (Molothrus ater), a species in which only males sing...

Editorial response: Let's get started.

Song types , song performance , and the use of repertoires in dark - eyed juncos ( Junco hyemalis )

Song performance encompasses the idea of how physiologically demanding different songs are to sing, and this is thought to reflect the singing ability of individual birds. In the dark-eyed junco (Junco hyemalis), each male has a repertoire of song types, some of which are shared with other males in the population. We used 4 measures of performance, based on trade-offs between song traits, to te...

Sex-role reversal in song? Females sing more frequently than males in the streak-backed oriole

Birds in which both sexes produce complex song are more common in the tropics than in the temperate north, where typically only males sing. Yet surprisingly little is known about female song characteristics in most tropical species. Here we present a comparison of female and male singing behaviors in the Streak-backed Oriole (Icterus pustulatus), a tropical songbird in which both sexes perform ...