Ardea
Official journal of the Netherlands Ornithologists' Union

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Lambrechts M. & Dhondt A.A. (1987) Differences in singing performance between male Great Tits. ARDEA 75 (1): 43-52
Great Tits sing in bouts, which are formed by a group of repeated strophes (song bursts of phrases) of one song type separated by periods of silence. There are clear differences in mean strophe length (average number of phrases per strophe) and positive drift (this is a phenomenon in which the intra- and interphrase pauses gradually increase in the strophe) of the two-note song types between the males. Although mean strophe length was influenced by phrase length within the individual, some males consistently sang any two-note song type in their repertoire in shorter strophes than others. Mean strophe length was related to repertoire size and negatively related to positive drift. There was no trend to sing longer strophes when the birds were confronted with song playback. Only the males with long spontaneous mean strophe length just before the playback experiment sang a significantly longer mean strophe length during the playback. No evidence was found that the song features we considered change from one year to the next in a systematic way. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that there exist measurable differences in song capacity between male Great Tits. In this context we propose a new hypothesis about the functional meaning of song matching.


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