The Life of Birds by David Attenborough

Author:David Attenborough [Attenborough, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-09-25T17:00:00+00:00

Saddlebacks are among the most loquacious and melodious of New Zealand’s native singing birds. They are the size of starlings, black with a chestnut patch across the back and the upper part of the wings so that when they sit with their wings folded, the patch forms a continuous and conspicuous saddle. The males have small orange-coloured wattles dangling from the base of the beak. Local groups do not merely develop their own accent, they introduce so many new phrases and motifs that even a small group develops its own dialect. Each member of a group occupies a territory in the forest and holds it throughout the year, defending it from intruders by singing from regular perches strung out along its frontier. As he does so, his nearest neighbour will respond to the challenge by singing in response, as a robin does.

Young male saddlebacks, when they fledge, wander unobtrusively through the forest, keeping low in the trees and often feeding on the ground so as not to challenge any of the established territory holders. As they wander, so they come to recognise all the different dialects being sung for miles around. Usually they spend most of their time some distance from where they hatched in areas where their parent’s dialect is not used. They are on the lookout for widows.

If a male vanishes, the young bachelors detect his absence extraordinarily swiftly and start to sing. One was observed to do so within ten minutes of the owner’s disappearance. But the song a bachelor uses is not that sung by his father. Instead, he uses the dialect of the area he happens to be in, for this is the version that the widowed female has become accustomed to and which she prefers. If she accepts him, he will take over the territory. As a result of this regular behaviour, inbreeding among saddlebacks is kept to a minimum.

In those cases where a pair of birds hold a territory jointly and the year round, the two may share the task of defending it with song. The ‘to-whit to-whoo’ call of a tawny owl is one of the characteristic sounds of the English countryside at night, the more noticeable in winter since that is a time when many of the summer visitors have left and many of the residents have fallen silent. The call, with those of the cuckoo and the chiffchaff, is one of the few that is simple enough to be accurately conveyed by written words. But it is more complex than it may seem. It is produced not by a single bird but by a pair. The female is responsible for the first section – ‘to-whit’. Then the male, often sitting quite far away, will call ‘to-whoo’, his timing being so perfect that the two calls together form a single statement.

Many birds which live together for several years use this method of keeping their relationship firm. African barbets sing their duets sitting close beside one another on a branch. Their performance

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