Cultural evolution of birdsong: Changes of Tree Pipit vocalization in year-to-decade temporal scales

Abstract

Social learning gives rise to culture, which is defined as socially learned behaviors that are shared among members of a community and persist over generations. Song of the passerines is one of the most studied and well-known examples of culture, as young birds acquire their species-specific songs through social learning. In addition, the song or its structures, such as syllable types, can evolve through various mechanisms, such as learning biases or copying errors, during this transmission between and within generations and across populations. The aim of the study was to uncover the possible mechanisms behind the song evolution of Tree pipits. Altogether 207 males were recorded, and the study population was continuously monitored for 12 years-period. It was revealed that learning bias could be one of the possible mechanisms that play a role during song transmission of the studied population, since dominant syllable types were stable over the years and survived until 2022. Moreover, the function of dominant syllable types such as species-specific recognition could lead to this conservative pattern. Also, there were some syllable types other than the dominant ones that also survived over the years. The longer survival of these syllable types could be due to a preference for learning local syllable...