No overlap in song repertoire size between yearling and older Starlings Sturnus vulgaris
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Rudolf F. Verheyen; Rianne Pinxten; Marcel Eens
- Source
- Ibis
- Subject
- animal structures
biology
Ecology
Repertoire
Zoology
First year of life
biology.organism_classification
nervous system
Sturnus
behavior and behavior mechanisms
Animal Science and Zoology
Animal communication
psychological phenomena and processes
Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
- Language
- ISSN
- 0019-1019
We recorded the song of 25 male Starlings Sturnus vulgaris to investigate differences in song characteristics between yearling and older males. Older males had significantly larger repertoire sizes and sang significantly longer average song bouts than yearling males. Since older males had almost twice as large a repertoire size as yearling males and since there was no overlap in repertoire size between yearling and older males, our data indicate that the repertoire size of Starlings increases after the first year of life. The largest difference between yearling and older males occurred in the ‘variable song types’ which are the song types containing most of the heterospecific imitations sung in a song bout.