Scientists find the secret of birdsong's 'spectacular diversity'

Image source, Clément Cornec/ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab Image caption, The songs of birds like this European wren are shaped by their environment

Scientists in France say they have discovered the building blocks of the incredible diversity of birdsong.

A team analysed more than100,000 songs from 3,000 bird species and revealed that they are all composed of eight fundamental types of sound that the researchers call "motifs".

Each song, they say, is made up of combinations of these motifs - three types of trill, three types of whistle, chaotic notes and harmonies.

Birdsong is one of the natural world's most sophisticated forms of sound-based communication.

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Listen to the eight acoustic building blocks of birdsong

Its variety and complexity has fascinated biologists, but with so many different songs, it has been difficult to study on a global scale.

Lead researcher and University of Saint-Etienne PhD student Quentin Bacquelé explained: "The diversity is huge. And if you go to Asia, Africa, Amazonia, you will hear totally different songs."

In a new study, he and his colleagues used a global database of birdsong - recordings uploaded by thousands of volunteers. This meant they could analyse about 116,000 songs from more than 3,000 birdsong species.

They studied patterns in the songs - how each song shifted and changed through time. And with the help of AI, they could then compare the thousands of songs to each other - to find what connected them.

The scientists said this unveiled "a simplicity underlying the spectacular diversity of birdsongs".

Image source, Chester Zoo Image caption, The tropical Javan green magpie is critically endangered

A key finding was that the environment the birds evolved in - from tropical forest to temperate landscape - shaped how they "composed" their songs.

So birds adapted for tropical forests use different acoustic building blocks, or motifs, to those from temperate regions.