Dialectical dilemmas

Have you noticed that when you travel outside of Wellington, birds that you are familiar with here can sound slightly or even substantially different? This is because, like people, birds have regional dialects! 

Dialects can have important implications for conservation work: for example, researchers found that kōkako translocated from different areas will preferentially breed with birds that had dialects similar to their own area of origin (though their subsequent offspring showed no such bias). In addition, during the titipounamu translocation to Zealandia in 2019, when we used song play-back to attract the birds into mist nets we made sure to use recordings taken from where we were catching the birds. This was because researchers have found that many bird species respond more strongly to local calls rather than more ‘foreign’ dialects! 

One particularly fascinating piece of research compared the dialects of yellowhammer, which is a Eurasian passerine, in both its native region (Great Britain) and in New Zealand. These researchers found that New Zealand populations had a very different composition of dialects to those in Great Britain and even noted some that weren't picked up in Great Britain at all. Interestingly, these missing dialects were likely ones that had historically been in Great Britain but have since disappeared—but have been preserved in New Zealand yellowhammer populations!

Photo by Scott Langdale