Birds Tap Their Beaks in Rhythm to Songs

Java sparrows click their bills together in rhythm to the songs that they sing, similar to a person imitating the sounds of a drum machine while humming at the same time.

The discovery reveals that bird songs can be incredibly complex, integrating non-vocal sounds with tweeted songs. The findings, published in PLOS ONE, add to the growing body of evidence that humans aren’t the only animals with rhythm.

The video below captures some of the bird’s songs. Note how the bill clicks blend seamlessly into the “tunes.”

“We show that male Java sparrows coordinate their bill-click sounds with the syntax of their song-note sequences, similar to percussionists,” co-authors Masayo Soma and Chihiro Mori wrote in the paper.

For the study, they analyzed archived recordings of Java sparrows, also known as Java finches. They investigated differences in bill click frequency as well as the coordination between song notes and bill clicks. They further looked at how easy the songs were to learn, and if the songs were passed down from parents to their offspring.

Soma and Mori determined “that bill-clicking patterns are similar between social fathers and their sons.” This suggests that fathers teach their sons the rhythmic clicks, just as they teach them the song notes.

Now the question is: Why do the birds even bother to do this?

Could creating a beat help to attract females when the males are courting them with songs? Does the rhythm prompt females to tap their beaks too, encouraging a seductive synchronicity between the bird pair? Females are known to produce bill clicks, according to the authors, so perhaps this may be true.

Read more at Discovery News