TWEET TWEET Y'ALL

Did you know that birds have accents? It’s true. I read it in a bird book a long time ago. I didn’t have to read it, though. I knew it was true.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to birds and especially remember listening to a mockingbird in my grandparents’ yard, watching as it sat high atop a telephone pole just singing away. I know that mockingbirds imitate, nearly duplicate, a variety of other bird calls. The mockingbird imitates the birds that he encounters wherever it is that he lives, and mockingbirds live most places east of the Rockies in the United States and southern Canada. Not all birds have the same range, so it isn’t surprising that a mockingbird in Virginia would have a different vocabulary (so to speak) than a mockingbird in Arkansas. And so that has proved to be true, as I realized when we moved to Arkansas and I heard mockingbirds here. But that isn’t what I meant by a bird having an accent.

When we moved to Arkansas, we moved to a house in the country with lots of birds around. One bird call that I recognized was that of a whippoorwill. The bird sounded the same, but not exactly the same, as I was used to hearing in the past. The last syllable, the “will” of the “whip-poor-will” was sort of drawn out to two syllables. It almost sounded like the bird was saying “whip-poor-whe-el, whip-poor-whe-el.” By golly, it had a southern accent! Not a Virginia southern accent, but an Arkansas southern accent. People sounded different in both places, but who would have thought the birds here would sound like they were from Arkansas, too!

Of course my family thought I was just a bit loony when I pointed out the bird’s southern accent. So, I looked up whippoorwills and birdcalls in a library book (that was a long time ago, before I could just Google it online) and I honestly did read that birds have regional accents. I know I did. I can’t find the reference anymore, but I did not make that up. When I Googled today to try to find proof online, I actually found a report of a scientific study done in Australia – and reported this year – that whipbirds in different parts of Australia sing the same song, but with regional accents.

Now, I wonder how much they paid those scientists to figure that out! It really was a sophisticated study with recordings of 112 birds in 16 bird populations, measuring the syllables in the songs, the frequency, the time between the frequency extremes and other characteristics. It was probably a lot of fun to go traipsing through Australia recording whipbirds, too. Oh, well. I’m no scientist, and I’ve never really traipsed anywhere just to listen to whippoorwills, but even with my untrained, unscientific ear, I could have told those Australian scientists 15 years ago that birds have regional accents!

Below is a link to a story about the Australian study, on the Discovery Channel news site. They even have some audio clips if you want to hear the birds yourself. Maybe I’ll try to record our Arkansas whip-poor-whe-els and post the audio on my blog. I don’t know how to do that, but it would be sort of scientific – and you wouldn’t have to take my word for it! http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060320/birdaccent_ani.html