Wood Thrush Repertoire

Each individual Wood Thrush that I've recorded (around Cincinnati, Ohio) has a repertoire of about 20 different songs, sung with immediate variation (A,B,C,D.... not A,A,A,B,B,B,B... These songs are made up of two parts, the parts iften occuring in multiple songs. The ways this works is set out here based on the consecutive songs from a single bird.

This recording

woth-2006-04-29_12_17 is from Bowles Woods in Miami Whitewater Forest, 29 April 2006, about 10 AM. It contains 57 consecutive songs. I've cut the entire recording into individual songs and arranged them in a table (illustrated with a sonogram and sometimes with a link to an audio file of the song). You can see the number (location, phrase) in the entire sequence that the occupied.

As is evident here, this Wood Thrush's songs are composed of two parts, a beginning and ending element. Here there are 6 distinct starting elements (1,2,...,6) and 12 ending elements (A,B,...,L) and these are combined to form 19 different songs.

While this illustration is based on just one recording of onne bird, this is the basic pattern I've observed in over 10 birds records across several days at 3 locations. The details of the beggining and ending elements change from bird to bird, but the overall nature and size of the repertoires is fairly constant.

A collecction of questions about these songs that I've yet to address is the extent to which neighgboring birds have similar song elements and the question of whether birds recognized the songs of there nesting territory neighbors. This has been demonstrated in other species. If you're interested in working on this problem, let me know!

Group 0a (n=6)	1A	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-1.wav play	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-32.wav play	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-46.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-60.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-81.wav
Group 0b (n=5)	1B	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-20.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-40.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-55.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-70.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-8.wav
Group 1a (n=2)	2C	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-11.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-31.wav
Group 1b (n=4)	2D	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-24.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-44.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-63.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-83.wav
Group 1c (n=4)	2E	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-3.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-34.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-56.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-73.wav
Group 2a (n=4)	3F	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-15.wav play	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-26.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-54.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-64.wav
Group 2b (n=3)	3G	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-39.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-6.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-78.wav
Group 2c (n=1)	3H	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-45.wav
Group 3a (n=2_	4I	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-12.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-50.wav
Group 3b (n=2)	4J	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-17.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-62.wav
Group 3c (n=3)	4F	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-2.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-33.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-76.wav
Group 3d (n=1)	4K	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-57.wav
Group 4a (n=2)	5H	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-14.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-82.wav
Group 4b (n=6)	5L	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-38.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-49.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-59.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-66.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-7.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-77.wav
Group 4c (n=1)	5A	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-19.wav
Group 5a (n=7)	6G	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-16.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-28.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-37.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-51.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-61.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-65.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-79.wav
Group 5b (n=1)	6E	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-22.wav
Group 5c (n=2)	6K	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-41.wav	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-5.wav
Group 5d (n=1)	6I	woth-2006-04-29_12_17-phrase-71.wav