Female Songbirds: The Latest Underrepresented Voices in Science

Female Troupial, Photo Credit: Dr. Karan Odom Songbirds may be nature’s pop stars, but the females are still waiting for a turn in the spotlight -- we don’t even know if females sing in about 70 percent of songbird species. This is because the study of birds has a gender gap: most previous research has focused on male song. Participants in the Female Bird Song Project are looking to right this imbalance. “I think this is a very important project. It involves citizen science in gathering fundamental information about the behavioral diversity of birds,” says evolutionary ornithologist Richard Prum of Yale University. Researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Leiden University call on birders to contribute videos, photos, sound clips and field notes of female bird songs so they can better understand the evolution and role of this expressive behavior. Their research already revealed that female birds have most likely been singing for tens of millions of years. To participate, citizen scientists use their smartphones or other recording devices to document female songs and upload them to project-sponsored online databases. Principal investigator Dr. Karan Odom, a behavioral ecologist at Leiden and Cornell, says every recording is important because, “Female birds are so under-represented in collections and we know so little about their songs.” Odom is currently studying the songs of Venezuelan Troupials in Puerto Rico, and has discovered that females sing more often during the day than the males. By studying when, where and why female birds sing, Odom and her colleagues hope to shine a new light into songbirds’ singing culture, and explore how singing varies between the sexes in different species. “This is an opportunity to contribute to a whole new area of science,” says ornithologist and principal investigator Dr. Mike Webster.