ALBAWABA - In an unexpected turn of events, researchers in Australia stumbled upon a fascinating phenomenon while studying superb fairywrens. As they placed recorders in the nests of these songbirds, they discovered that the female wrens were singing to their unhatched eggs.
What's more surprising is that once the chicks finally hatched, experts noticed that all the birds in the same nest used a similar tune to beg their parents for food. This melody resembled a part of their mother's song, which she had sung to them while they were still embryos.
To investigate further, the researchers decided to shuffle the eggs between nests to determine if the chicks were learning their mother's song even before hatching. The results showed that the chicks that hatched sang the song of their new nest, not their true one, indicating that the behavior was learned in the embryo stage.
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Building on this discovery, researchers expanded their study to include seven other related species, including the splendid fairywren and the red-backed fairywren, among others. They found that in all of these birds, the females sang to their unhatched eggs, starting around day 10 of incubation.
While it was historically believed that birdsong was mainly an instinctual trait observed in male birds for courtship purposes, recent studies have shown that over 70 percent of female songbirds worldwide also sing. The discovery among female fairywrens reinforces the idea that female song is not an evolutionary mistake but serves a crucial purpose in avian life.
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While the exact reasons for this early learning of song remain unknown, researchers have proposed a couple of theories. One possibility is that vocalizations in the nest help fairywrens avoid falling victim to being fooled by cuckoos, which lay their eggs in other birds' nests to avoid raising their offspring. Another hypothesis suggests that by singing to their young, female wrens are imparting cultural traits that could be advantageous to future generations.
The musical abilities of female birds are gradually being recognized, challenging the long-held notion that female birds tend to be silent.
