When it comes to keeping time, an unassuming species of songbird is on a par with professional musicians, according to an audio analysis.
The study is the first to investigate natural time-keeping ability of an animal in the wild, rather than under observation in the lab - and scientists have hailed the song abilities of the scaly-breasted wren for its perfectly-timed whistle-like chirps.
Birds don’t have songbooks. But some species sing the same tune, chirping notes in an identifiable pattern. For the scaly-breasted wren, the pattern goes like this: an opening blast of chirps followed by alternating intervals of chirps and pauses, with the pauses between each chirp getting progressively longer.
The pauses between each chirp grow in a predictable way - lengthening by about a half second each time. After the pause reaches about 10 seconds long, the birds then repeat their song from the top.
“It is a really remarkable change from short intervals to long intervals in the same song,” says Carlos Antonio Rodriguez-Saltos, who conducted the research and led the study at the University of Texas at Austin.