I am interested in sustainability in the violin and cello trade, particularly using locally sourced fallen trees rather than relying on endangered forest timber importations. In re-voicing restored violins or commissioning makers, I use the male UK Blackbird song as a source of inspiration. On which note, I have a male blackbird "wolf whistling" in my garden this year. I have never heard them do this before. My question is this: "Is the blackbird imitating humans or did we first imitate birds doing this? I know it's a male blackbird because I saw him the following day on my fence opening his beak and make the exact same "wolf whistle". I have the sound recorded on video on my YOUTUBE channel . I wonder if anyone knows the answer.
13 July 2024 2:01pm
Hi Mike,
You ask a great question and hopefully an expert on thrush vocalisations will be able to answer you more precisely than I can. However, what I can tell you is that many species of song birds are constantly evolving their calls for a whole range of reasons and while there are innate call characteristics for most species, there is usually a learnt component as well which can be mimicry or simply learning to sing from the available song around them. In Australia (and I believe elsewhere) we have some examples of threatened species with drastically reduced populations that have started to forget their own song because they simply do not have enough adult birds around them from whom to learn the song. They pick up the song of other abundant species which becomes problematic when it comes time for them to breed.
In many urbanised parts of the world, birds have changed their call to find an acoustic window not occupied by anthropogenic noise
So the questions I would start with are:
Do your British blackbirds have a shortage of example calls from their own species which might lead to them changing their call?
Are your blackbirds migrating and breeding somewhere there were a shortage of teachers?
Is there that much Wolf Whistling still going on in Britain?
If blackbirds are doing as well in Britain as they are in their feral range, then I think a lack of available call teachers is unlikely. Other possibilities are that the individual has learnt a modified call because of a change in its acoustic environment, or it has emigrated (blown in) from somewhere that blackbirds have a different call dialect. Perhaps you could scour an online call library like Xeno-Canto to see if you can find a match for your local blackbird.
Matthew Stanton
Western Sydney University