What can we learn from songbirds?
Date:
My presentations in a local elementary school, “What can we learn from songbirds?” aim to communicate the passion for science and describe some of the questions we have and how songbirds can help us answer them in the lab.
The talks used multiple techniques to demonstrate what is birdsong and how songbirds learn and produce vocalizations.
The Slides contained sounds of several species endemic to New England like the Black-throated blue warbler, the Blackburnian warbler, the Scarlet Tanager, and the Wood Thrush.
A key component of the talk was the fact that songbirds, like humans, need to learn their vocalizations from a tutor. This was demonstrated in videos showing male zebra finches tutoring their young. For example this one from Todd Roberts’ lab:
and this one from Michael Long’s lab.
To demonstrate the fact that juvenile songbirds need to train to improve their copy of the tutor’s song I used the generational gap .. and guessed that five-graders are not too familiar with rock classics. Children volunteered to hear verses from the Beatles, Queen, Cat Stevens, or Eric Clapton and then repeat it. Hilarity ensued and the lesson was learned - practice makes perfect.
To demostrate basic concepts about sound I used a nice app for mac os developed by Nathan Perkins that allowd visualizing spectrograms in real time. Children volunteered to make different narrow band, broadband, voiced and nonvoiced sounds (clap, hiss, ahhh) and just see how those sounds create very different spectrograms. It was a lot of fun.