A new study knocks down a popular hypothesis about why birds sing at dawn
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Researchers have some new evidence about what makes birds make so much noise early in the morning, and it's not for some of the reasons they previously thought.
For decades, a dominant theory about why birds sing at dawn — called the "dawn chorus" — has been that they can be heard farther and more clearly at that time.
Sound travels faster in humid air and it's more humid early in the morning. It's less windy, too, which is thought to lessen any distortion of their vocalizations.
But scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and Project Dhvani in India combed through audio recordings of birds in the rainforest. They say they didn't find evidence to back up this "acoustic transmission hypothesis."
It was among the hypotheses involving environmental factors. Another is that birds spend their time singing at dawn because there's low light and it's a bad time to look for food.
"We basically didn't find much support for some of these environmental cues which have been purported in literature as hypotheses" for why birds sing more at dawn, says Vijay Ramesh, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell and the study's lead author.
The study, called " Why is the early bird early? An evaluation of hypotheses for avian dawn-biased vocal activity ," was published this month in the peer-reviewed journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
The researchers didn't definitively point to one reason for why the dawn chorus is happening, but they found support for ideas that the early morning racket relates to birds marking their territory after being inactive at night, and communicating about finding food.
The team analyzed recordings from audio recorders placed at 43 locations in the Western Ghats mountain range in southern India, which is known as a biodiversity hotspot. They examined sounds of what they determined were 69 different species of birds. They studied recordings from the hours around dawn and the hours around dusk to compare activity.
Unsurprisingly to anyone who's been woken up by a cacophony of bird calls, the "vast majority" of species they studied had "significantly higher" vocal activity at dawn compared to dusk.
In order to evaluate the acoustic transmission hypothesis, they first had to make a prediction: that birds that vocalize at higher frequencies would be more active at dawn than at dusk. They predicted this because they said higher frequencies are more susceptible to degradation due to environmental factors, such as wind and humidity.
But they write that they found "no significant relationship between the peak frequency of vocalizations" and a type of bird's preference for making noise at dawn instead of dusk.
And when the researchers looked into another "environmental" factor — that birds sing in the low light of dawn because that low light makes a bad time to forage — it would make sense that the same would be true at dusk. But most birds were far more vocal at dawn.
"I think that that's probably the most significant finding here, is not to demonstrate what the dawn chorus is about definitively, but to rule out this class of hypotheses, this environmental open window set of hypotheses," says Steve Nowicki, a professor of biology at Duke University who has studied birdsong and was not involved in the study.
The relationships they did spotlight were that birds that were more territorial, and those with an omnivorous diet, were more vocal at dawn rather than dusk.
Birds that are highly territorial "tend to make advertisements early in the morning to sort of like claim territories or advertise where they are" after a night of inactivity, Ramesh says.
And when it comes to food, birds are engaging in "a lot of communication about where resources are, or often if there is a predator nearby," he says. They speculate that a reason that omnivorous birds have a "marginally higher" level of vocal activity at dawn is because they often participate in flock "hunting parties" that more often happen at dawn. But as to why those hunting parties happen at dawn to begin with, they aren't sure.
As the researchers note, there are plenty of caveats. They only studied birds in one particular tropical region in India (Ramesh says there's "pretty much no overlap" with bird species we see in the U.S.). They didn't observe the birds visually, and didn't record exactly when dawn and dusk started, they just used approximate times.
Plenty of hypotheses exist for the dawn chorus. Nowicki says the researchers here didn't examine some others, including that birds sing in the morning to warm up, "like a performer doing vocal warmups," or that it's related to females mating in the early morning.
In the paper, the scientists noted opportunities for future research using more sophisticated audio equipment and climate monitoring.
"Sometimes there are phenomena, like the dawn chorus could be one, where there's not a single causal reason. And that's kind of frustrating to scientists," Nowicki adds.
There could be "different reasons that species are more likely to sing at dawn or not," he says. "In some ways that's an unsatisfying answer because it's not buttoning things up."
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At times there is a simpler reason ... birds and squirrels have a pact on when they can tease cats; birds get the early mornings and squirrels the rest of the day.
I like that theory
birds usually don't bother me, except for the swallows at the intersections, and the noisy brood lodged at the top of my balcony. I admire smart birds like crows, ravens, magpies, hawks and eagles. the rest are potential cat food on the wing and deservedly so ...
I don't like city squirrels and haven't for 40+ years. they're rodents, exceptionally acrobatic rodents, that became my enemy back in my lineman days. I liked to catch them mid-span on the phone and cable lines between the telephone poles and test their flying wallenda skills as the wave that I had caused by pulling the line bounced back and forth between the poles. few of them managed to hang on past the 3rd swell ...
I like them all except for house sparrows and cow birds. They're useless.
I have an abundance of squirrels. They've learned how to climb the feeder pole and hang upside down on the raccoon proof feeder I have. Charlene was trying to catch one the other day, but she's getting fat and slow
The only ones that bother me are the whippoorwills. My dog thinks they're people, whistling at him, and that gets him barking.
Morning...mean person.. what's wrong with squirrels??
Cute and fluffy what more could you want...nasty person....
Hate crows..had my way I would shoot them here and they are fair game on the roads..damn things are to smart though plus they are protected...kill one and it's $$$ and/or jail...
Evil looking things and they make the most dreadful noise...
I do like how they think that automobiles should yield to them when they cross the street, when it's bloody too late ...
Double nasty person...
what's wrong with crows? they're smarter than some humans. I've hand fed ravens snags in the desert before. they are wickedly smart ...
They kill all the other native birds in the areas they take over...wreck their nests eat their chicks etc..
And the worst the bloody things sit on the backs of new born lambs and pluck their eyes out while they are alive...farmers shoot crows on sight if they get the chance...
Plus they flip the lids up on the rubbish bins and pull out the garbage which goes everywhere..I have watched them work in unison to do it..to smart for their own good..but nothing a bullet wouldn't fix..
Speak of the devil there are some cawing out the front now.. revolting bloody things...here people say crows are a sign of death...
you remind me of all the ladies that would give me bloody hell when I was up on the telephone poles and their little friends would be chattering away and trying to urinate on me, and then their highwire act would come to an abrupt end, by me, with them landing in the yard, unharmed ... they really shouldn't have been working without a net ...
we called them circus rats ...
oh well, I still love you ...
uh oh ... post the number of the closest flower shop ...
Well obviously the squirrels saw you and they knew they were on to a good thing and stuck with it..🤣 what a classic being peed on by a squirrel...just about choked on my Vegemite toast picturing it....
Pity it's not my photo...😁
... and worse. bloody pests, it's not like you can step out of the way if you've gaffed up (hooked) the pole ...
standing on a ladder isn't much better. no worries, it's only a 6 meter drop if the bottle washer tailed rats lose their balance in the middle, and then they scamper away. the unfortunate ones run up the pole and sometimes they touch the wrong line ... oops ...
You were a captive audience and they knew it and took advantage...
A warm shower on a Winters day...you could have been short circuited as well.
All "power" to the squirrel....🐿️
Snort!
I have quite a few bird feeders thru out my yard and spend a considerable amount of time observing them.
Cardinals are the earliest risers. I used to think hummingbirds were the lazy ones but they get up right around sunrise. The lazy ones are the blue jays. They must have really poor eye sight because I don't see them mucking about until a least 30-60 minutes after sunrise. That's also when they start the cat torture
I don't have bird feeders anymore because they tempt bears. But when I did, the blue jays were the meanest birds out there. They'd drive away every other type of bird, and even the most persistent squirrels.
They're the neighborhood trash according to the chickadees, titmice, and cardinals.
I don't' have bears....yet
It's been a few years since I've seen a bear, but when they're around, they come right up on the front porch, so I try to avoid doing anything to attract them.
My mom used to have lots of bird feeders but had problems with one bear. He kept knocking over her feeder pole and destroying the feeders. So she calls PA Game and Fish and they tell her they will give HER the ticket for baiting the bear. Absurd!
Good deeds come with deserved or not punishments.
They could have just told her that they don't kill or relocate bears, and advised her about how to avoid luring them in.
they could have but apparently the GFC in that part of PA are real jerks
maybe they're too busy with amish wagon drag races ...
that would be the state troopers not the GFC
Bears in the backyard?? Stuff that...
Huh and Devangy thinks it's dangerous here on my rock.....🤣
Just black bears. They're not very aggressive, unless you threaten their cubs. I'd still rather they avoid my porch, though.
IMO this is a perfect example of why DOGE is needed. How much money did this study cost? What real-world benefits would come from this study?
With the national debt as high as it is, why is money being wasted on something that doesn't produce any real contribution to the world? I mean, who really cares if birds make more noise at dawn than any other time of the day?
It was done in a University lab in India
DOGE if fucking worse than useless.
How would one know before it's studied? We don't live in a vacuum, everything around us affects something else and studying something in one area has lead to important breakthroughs in another.
Just because it was done in India doesn't mean there were no US dollars spent on it. How much tax money has been shipped overseas for a multitude of studies? After all, we were sending funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for their studies.
While it's true that when performing a study in one area, results can cause breakthroughs in other areas, I still have to doubt if this study was ever truly intended to find any benefit. This reads more as if a neat way to obtain funding to spend a few months doing nothing important but still have money in the bank. With all the problems in the world and the simple fact that money is a limited supply, why should money be wasted on something like this?
Show us some proof and then we'll talk. Otherwise you're just making unsubstantiated assumptions.
I don't think you understand how these things get funded. Sitting around studying audio tape from some other study probably doesn't require special funding. The people working in the labs have a salary and funding comes in the form of block grants for whole departments. It's true they have to be working on something to keep their employment status, but that's not to say it was the only thing they were working on either.
First, it's your opinion it's wasted. Second, it still doesn't seem to be your money. Lastly, money is always being wasted on all sorts of less important things like big beautiful parades on certain emperor's birthdays.
We know that the US sends grants to many countries to be used in research. That money supply has been there for a great many years. Not sure why you feel the need to deflect from that.
Seems you're trying to twist away from the initial issue. Never said this study had to have special funding but where does it mean that this was a worthwhile study?
Of course it's my opinion. Every posting on this entire site is someone's opinion as none of us here are the leaders of any topic under discussion on this site. To throw out a partisan retort when talking about money being wasted is IMO a losing side. I was not in favor of the parade and I know that the federal government wastes a lot of money daily.
This entire thread started because I mentioned DOGE. I firmly believe that the federal government needs to get a handle on spending as it's impact to future generations is huge. But all I've gotten back is partisan replies. It's sad because this is an issue that is going to impact ALL Americans down the road. By continuing to frame this in a partisan manner, we all but insure that it will never be solved because the partisan approach is to always blame the other side. We surely cannot rely on the federal government to solve it, so we have to get 'We the People' involved. Otherwise about all we can leave future generations is a greatly lowered standard of living.
Money is not limited in supply, it is limited in distribution.
You are ignoring the context. The money in this case is the revenue collected by the federal government. Based on current tax laws and the simple fact that we continue to have budget deficits it is obvious that the supply of money the federal government has to work with is limited. IMO the federal government does not work very hard to limit what it distributes as too many feel we can just borrow more money. We have already hit the $trillion dollar point on interest payments on the national debt, that is money that cannot be used for other more important things. Where does it end?
Maybe find out before complaining.
Exactly what a lot of people thought about that parade Trump slept through last weekend.
Yes, they've been really effective at reducing waste, rather than firing necessary personnel, like the people who monitor our nuclear weapons.
We all need tech bros who don't understand the coding used at the Social Security Administration sticking their noses into our personal information.
DOGE is doing a great job. Every bit as good as one would expect from a group of frat kids led by a drug addict.
Never said DOGE is doing a great job, but IMO they are doing a necessary job. We waste so much money every year on stupid shit that has no real impact except for politicians to show how much tax money they are bringing back home, all in order to get re-elected. And we continue to borrow money to pay for all this.
How many future generations are saddled with this debt and how badly will it impact their lives? We are not leaving the world a better place for our children and this debt is definitely one area where we continue to fuck over the future generations.
Just how much money has DOGE saved? And where is that money?
How?
Their approach is doing more harm than good. They're not preventing waste. They're endangering us.
And they're not doing it for free.
DOGE is currently the waste.
I think it's way too early to count that as the current federal system has worked to resist everything being done by DOGE. How many court cases are still pending around DOGE? I'm waiting to see the end results and I don't know that will be fully known for many years yet. But I applaud the approach as government wastes too much money. The FY 2024 deficit was $1.8 trillion and the FY 2025 deficit is currently tracking higher than that. We cannot afford to continue to throw money around.
That IMO is a partisan response. How much of their not preventing waste is due to lawsuits filed against them? Lawsuits one might say is an attempt to preserve the status quo.
Of course they're not doing it for free. Why the hell would they do that? But it's obvious that DOGE is not the only current waste in the federal government. We won't see any benefit from this for years yet. But if government continues on it's current path, how badly will future generations be impacted? Our generation is going to see the impact of the federal government refusing to change Social Security and without change we already know how badly that will impact us. How can we turn a blind eye to the future generations.
It's supposed to be the adult thing, to want to leave the world better for future generations. But how will future generations live if the federal government is in so much debt that they can no longer take care of the citizens?
Over a hundred cases are in some process of litigation involving money that was earmarked for spending.
If DOGE worked with Congress to fix the issues I would wholeheartedly agree with you. Instead they created chaos that I suspect will be reversed at an even greater cost than if they'd have left it alone.
Didn't we already have an agency that investigates fraud, waste and abuse? There was no need to bring in frat boys who don't anything about how government works. I really don't appreciate them trying to get access to information they have business having access to
Lawsuits designed to protect citizens' personal information, or to prevent employees from being fired without cause?
The audacity!
So they're doing a shit job, and getting paid for it, but that's somehow not wasteful in and of itself? I guess wanting to get quality work when I pay for it is a partisan thing.
I wasn't aware that only liberals want somebody who knows what they're doing working with nuclear warheads and object to the wholesale firing of those folks.
It seems to me that your definition of "partisan" is a bit, well, partisan. DOGE has been a clusterfuck. Independents recognize this.
Tell that to these three guys who thought they could get away with 1/2 Billion dollars............FROM USAID
USAID seems to be the favorite whipping boy around here
p.s. your link goes to MSN but there's no story about USAID there
Here's the actual story.
So 4 people were convicted of fraud so they have to scrap the whole thing.
Isn't that like throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
You need to get the timeline straight.
DOGE didn't exist when this was discovered.
The guilty pleas started in June of last year.
You need to be thanking the Biden administration, not DOGE.
It is.
Also, credit here seems to be going to DOGE for discovering the fraud, when DOGE didn't exist yet.
And some lawsuits have been filed simply to cry 'you don't have the authority to fire me'. Some lawsuits have been won, some have been lost and the majority are still outstanding. Have there been fuckup's over the firings? Of course, simple to point to the mass firing of the NNSA which was almost immediately reversed. Should the people who pushed the mass firings be held accountable for their fuckup? Yes. But it's also a learning opportunity to insure that waste is addressed without throwing out the baby as well. It's possible that part of the mistake here was due to the speed they felt they had to work with as Musk was there for a limited time and Trump was pushing for results. Doesn't excuse that mistake but it can show how it happened.
This is also why I said that any real success due to DOGE won't be seen for many years. The federal government is very large and takes a good bit of time to show change. Congress allocates moneys that can be spread over several years and all it takes is another lawsuit to slow down the clawing back of allocated money. But IMO this is action that needs to happen, we either get this overspending under control or we give up on future generations having a country at all.
Parts of it have been a clusterfuck, doesn't mean it's not needed.
If we had a Congress that actually worked for the American people, DOGE probably wouldn't be needed as Congress could get a handle on the waste. But we don't have that, instead we have a Congress who's first allegiance is to their political party.
We may not have a king in this country but we sure as hell have 535 "princes" who attempt to rule.
ah-HA!
now the truth comes out
No, this one issue wasn't the only issue with USAID. There was a lack of tracking and accountability in the money as well as little valid oversight. For example...
And not all of USAID is gone, the remaining parts have been moved under the Secretary of State to ensure that foreign grants are in line with the direction of the US Government. I'll agree that the direction can and probably will vacillate with each new administration, but I also agree that funding grants should be more in line with the direction of the government.
ah-HA. It wasn't meant to point to DOGE just the fact that this type of shit goes on and they ARE needed to uncover it. AND the reasoning for crippling USAID who should have known this shit was/is going on. And okay, kudos to the Biden administration for finding this precursor to the need. Seems someone's took it seriously and saw the need for in depth investigations into all of the bullshit pork.
It's their fucking job unless you don't really think we need them at all.
It is their job, but their first allegiance is to their party rather than to the people who elected them. There's too much money and power in politics and IMO we are no longer governed by those who represent us but rather the backroom decisions made by the rulers in the parties.
IMO we need to take that power back but the only way short of another revolution would be if we can get at least 34 state legislative bodies to call for a Constitutional Convention. We need term limits and IMO age limits for our elected officials. But as the parties are larger than just the federal government, we won't see states calling for such a convention.
Who knows, maybe JR is right. Maybe we do live in a degraded country. But it's not liberals vs conservatives or even Democrats vs Republicans, it's the oligarchs and the political parties vs us.
And?
If you were a fired employee, and you believed that the person who had fired you did not have the authority to do so, should we expect you to just roll over?
DOGE is not an official government agency, per the Constitution. And Trump seems to think that Elon Musk is not a government employee, so should somebody not employed by an organization that's not even an official US agency have the power to hire and fire federal employees?
This is what you're defending.
Christ. You don't think that maybe we should have to learn that mass firing of the people who watch the nukes is a bad thing? You don't think that maybe any reasonably intelligent person should already know that they shouldn't do something so monumentally stupid, even if they can probably fix it come Monday?
Tell me again how DOGE works for the American people. Wholesale firings. Employees ignorant of how Social Security works, but given access to SS, anyway. Pulling funding for medical research.
But that's exactly what you're claiming didn't happen, and that's why we need DOGE.
But this was discovered without DOGE, and prosecuted.
You're contradicting yourself in order to defend the chaotic DOGE.
We all know there is a lot of fraud and waste in the federal government. All I'm saying is that DOGE or anything else that can be brought in to find and help eliminate the fraud and waste is a good thing. Have there been fuckups in how they have performed this, absolutely yes there has been. I don't know how to make this any clearer, I'm not defending DOGE. I'm saying the actions to remove the fraud and waste is needed. We cannot continue down this same path.
It would be a good thing, if they were doing that. They're not.
If they were, they'd be calling out the cost to taxpayers to refit Trump's emoluments-clause defying gift from Qatar. We'll be footing the bill for that, and then it will be released to him for use.
They'd be calling out the multiple trips to Mar-A-Lago. But they aren't going to, and we all know it. Because they don't work for the American people. They work for Trump.
And yes, you've been defending DOGE.
It's the DoD's "gift" NOT for Trump's personal use.
A distinction without a difference.
And what do you think will happen once it's part of his "library"?
I also notice you don't address the problem of the cost of refitting it. That's the type of wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars DOGE is ostensibly supposed to be preventing. But DOGE works for Trump, not the taxpayers.
And I've been saying it will be years before we know all that they are able to do.
Or maybe they don't think they need to call it out because it's been all over the news, or maybe because it's not where they are currently working. You bitch about them because of the mistakes they have made by working too fast and not knowing exactly what the needs of the department under audit is doing yet you want them to jump in to areas they are not formally working. You can't have it both ways.
Bullshit. I've admitted they have made mistakes. What I'm in favor of is anything that will expose the fraud, waste and abuse that happens at the federal government level. I don't see anybody else stepping up to find and stop the abuse. I don't really care who's administration is happens under, all I care about is that it's happening. It really should be Congress that is doing this, but they have delegated too much of their power and cannot operate in a bi-partisan manner. In the absence of Congress, somebody has to do it.
As his library will actually be owned by the federal government, I would think the same as the aircraft on display in the Reagan Presidential Library.
For the record I was against accepting the airplane at all. The Qatar government has been trying to get rid of that aircraft for some time based on the news articles that came out after it was offered.
And in the here and now, we know what they're doing.
They're fucking up.
Spin away.
And excused the mistakes as "learning experiences". And excused the partisanship as "that's not what they're working on now," or "well, it's all over the news." Complained that when they fire people they don't have the legal power to fire, that those people stand up to them.
That's defending them.
That's odd. You literally posted a story about it upthread. You upvoted Jim's comment about it.
We're going to spend billions of dollars refitting it, then park it?
Whatever would an agency that exists to root out government waste say?
Well, heck I make more noise in the morning when I have just woke up than in the evening when I’m tired and getting ready for bed. I would think that would be true for most animals.
The cats and dogs I have known wakeup to have a nap.
Looks like I should have jumped in and sent #3 into the off topic wilderness ... meh.
Sorry. I can clean it up, if you'd like.
What's done is done, let it be.
I always thought that birds sing at dawn because they don't want me to sleep past 4 AM.