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The first day of spring brings thoughts like flowers, sunshine, and the singing of little birds. But now scientists are finding that, for at least one common bird, what sounds pleasant to you is actually a call to attack.This ScienCentral News video explains.
Fightin' Words
Chickadees are those tiny birds that sing their own name, but researchers say they are not looking for attention, they're picking a fight.
University of Washington biologist Chris Templeton says if you ever hear a chickadee scream "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee," you ought to take cover, because them's fightin' words!
"We've seen chickadees take on cats, we've seen chickadees take on owls, and we've seen chickadees take on eagles," he says.
As reported in Discover magazine, Templeton set up an outdoor aviary in Montana where he kept flocks of chickadees. He collected sound recording of the chickadees in order to learn more about what their 16 different calls mean. "Not only do they have all these different types of calls but the way that they say each call may have different meanings," Templeton explains.
The way chickadees sing their notorious chick-a-dee-dee call is an expression of how they feel about predators. When Templeton tethered owls, hawks, and eagles, as well as a cat and a ferret to pedestals inside the aviary he discovered that the chickadees use the "dee" in their song to call their flock mates to action and to tell them how dangerous a nearby predatory may be. The more dees in their call, the bigger the danger.
"The idea is that they talk to other chickadees in order to recruit [each other] to come towards the predator and mob it or harass it," he says. "They sort of dive bomb it, they fly really close and harass it, maybe even striking it on the back of the head."
From his sound recordings Templeton could see that when a chickadee encounters a great horned owl for example, which is not a very dangerous predator, the birds add only a few dees to the end of their call. But if they ran into a more dangerous predator, like a cat, there could be as many as eight dee notes screeched at the end. He says that he once recorded as many as 23 additional de" notes.
Bird expert Dan Mennill from the University of Windsor in Canada, says Templeton's research demonstrates that the chick-a-dee-dee call is really more like a "team cheer."
While the finding did not surprise Mennill, he says that it is exciting, and is further evidence that birds' communications systems are in "some ways more complex than humans even."
Templeton says that in addition to saying "Hey, there's a predator," the little birds are also saying "Hey there's a predator of this species or this danger level."
Two other chickadee songs frequently heard at backyard bird feeders are the "Phoe-bee" and the "Seet" calls. he says the birds use them to communicate with mates and to warn to flock mates of predators flying over head, respectively.
While the chick-a-dee-dee song calls birds to attack a perched predator, Templeton says the "Seet" call "causes all the other birds in the area just to sort of slick their feathers down and stick their heads up and just freeze."
Templeton is now investigating whether chickadees also communicate with other bird species.
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