[cobirds] Dickcissel song similarities and differences in Colorado

<<Chuck said: "An interesting difference between the two recordings. The Dickcissels I heard last month in Morgan, Washington, and Yuma Counties while doing BBS routes were all similar to SeEtta's Canon City area recording. In those counties, I haven't heard birds singing the song type recorded by Nathan Pieplow in Prowers County. Birds of North America Online reports there is individual variation in song within populations of Dickcissels, but no differences between populations. The BNA account also notes that Dickcissel vocalizations have not been well studied." >>

Chuck's identification of the same song by the northeast Colorado Dickcissels as the one I recorded in Canon City is interesting especially in light of the following info from an abstract, "GEOGRAPHIC PATTERNS OF SONG SIMILARITY IN THE DICKCISSEL" published in AUK in 2008.

• "Abstract.—Song sharing among neighboring males is a well-known, frequent outcome of song learning in oscine passerines
  and some other groups, but only limited investigations of the spatial scale of this phenomenon have been pursued. On the basis of recordings of 1,043 individuals, we investigated song sharing in Dickcissels (Spiza americana) at local and regional scales at sites from northern Kansas to northern Oklahoma. Classification of song elements revealed decreasing song similarity with increasing distances between individual birds at small to intermediate scales, to ~10 km. At the largest spatial scales (10-300 km between sites), there was very little similarity among sites and no obvious tendency for a decrease in similarity with increasing distances among our 30
  sites.  At our intensively sampled site, analyses of quantitative measurements showed that, at least for our most widely shared song element,frequency and duration were more similar in closer birds. Thus, distance between birds influences both quantitative and qualitativesong similarity in Dickcissels. Variability existed among sites in the shape of the song-sharing decay curve, which indicates that other factors besides distance also govern song-sharing patterns..." 

Given that study it would seem more likely that Nathan Pieplows Dickcissel from Prowers County would be more similar to the Canon City Dickcissel since it is located much closer than Chuck's Dickcissels in northeast Colorado.  It would be interesting to know if the Dickcissels being reported near Boulder and Longmont sing songs similar to either in my recording or Nathan's.

BTW, I should have noted that the song I recorded from the Dickcissel in Canon City this year is the same song (with minor variations I hear not only between birds but between songs by one bird such as an extra 'ciss, ciss') I have heard from Dickcissels that I have followed in the Canon City area since the first Dickcissel was found (I was present but not the identifier). 

SeEtta Moss
Canon City
Personal blog @ http://BirdsAndNature.blogspot.com
Blogging for Birds an Blooms Magazine @ http://BirdsAndBloomsBlog.com

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