This isn’t the first indication that there may be multiple northern cardinal species lurking around our backyards. While the Sonoran birds also ignored songs from distant birds in the same desert, the Chihuahuan cardinals reacted aggressively to the songs of their cousins, meaning there are some recognizable elements across the Chihuahuan calls that doesn’t appear in the Sonoran calls. “It’s like if you speak Portuguese in Portugal, you can probably understand Spanish, and you might understand French, but if you keep going further and further away, eventually you’ll hit German or Arabic-languages that are unfamiliar, that you can't parse.” “We saw that the birds are really aggressive to songs by their next-door neighbors, as you would expect, but once there is enough distance between them, they don't understand the songs anymore,” lead author Kaiya Provost of the American Museum of Natural History’s Richard Gilder Graduate School says in a press release. They found that the Sonoran cardinals preferred Sonoran songs and the Chihuahuan cardinals preferred Chihuahuan songs, but when they heard songs from the other population, the birds ignored the tune. At 128 different sites, the team played various male cardinal songs, including some from the immediate neighborhood, others from the same desert but farther away, songs from the distant desert population and a cactus wren song as a control. But if the birds are separated from one another for long enough, they will develop their own songs and calls that aren’t recognized by other birds of the same feather, a big step toward speciation.įor these desert cardinals, that seems to be the case. Over wide geographical areas, birds of the same species can develop regional dialects or variations. Each species of birds has its own repertoire of songs, calls and warning shouts. They then listened to their songs, which are a crucial differentiator in the bird world. The team first looked at the birds’ DNA and found that the two populations have been isolated from one another for 500,000 to 1 million years, which could be long enough for the process of speciation-the biological term for the formation of a new species-to begin. In the southwest, a population of cardinals in the Sonoran desert, which includes the southwest corner of Arizona and southern California, is separated by about 120 miles of high plains from another population in the Chihuahuan Desert, which includes west Texas, New Mexico, the southeast corner of Arizona and eastern Mexico. A new study suggests the bird may have diverged into several different species that can only be told apart by their calls and genetic profile, according to a paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.įor the study, researchers took advantage of naturally occurring experiment, reports Ryan F. Its hue makes the bird almost impossible to misidentify, but looks can be deceiving. One of the most iconic birds in the United States is the northern cardinal, a crested songbird known for its scarlet-red-and on the rare occasion, yellow-color.
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