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Wildlife: Breaking the Language Barrier
Immersing yourself in the local culture really does make learning a foreign language easier—even if you’re a nuthatch learning chick-a-dee-dee-dee.
According to a new study, red-breasted nuthatches can understand calls uttered from black-capped chickadees that warn about predators in the area, and they are able to interpret if a raptor poses a high or low danger.
“No one has ever seen this behavior before,” says Christopher Templeton, a University of Washington doctoral candidate who made the findings along with Erick Greene, a biologist at the University of Montana. “There are a fair number of animals that respond to other animals’ alarm calls. But this is the first example of subtle information from a call being interpreted by another species.”
Two years ago, Templeton found that chickadees, which are similar in size to nuthatches and have the same predators, have two types of alarm calls. When they see flying falcons, hawks or owls, they give a soft, high-pitched call. But if the predator is perched they use a loud, varied-pitch call in an attempt to beckon other birds to help harass and chase away the predator.
Their calls also vary depending on the size of the predator. For example, a small pygmy owl poses a greater danger to chickadees because it is smaller and more agile than the larger and less-maneuverable great horned owl, and the birds issue their calls accordingly.
To see if nuthatches responded to the chickadee alarm calls, Templeton placed speakers at the base of trees where nuthatches were present. When the small predator alarm was played, more nuthatches became agitated and flew closer to a speaker than when they heard the large owl alarm.
“We have no idea how nuthatches learn to interpret the chickadee calls,” says Templeton. “But that one animal has cracked the code and extracted the information from another species is pretty amazing.”
And as of yet, no one has found out if chickadees are as bilingual as their songbird cousins.
