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(疑似)原文未缩减 gitarrelieber
节选自Social influences on vocal development (@ Cambridge University Press 1997)
Author: Charles T. Snowdon, Martine Hausberger
The vocal talent of starlings has been known since antiquity, when Pliny considered their ability to mimic human speech noteworthy. Ornithologists know that this species possesses a rich repertoire of call and songs, composed of whistles, clicks, snarls, and screeches. In addition, starlings are well known for their ability to mimic the sounds of other animals or even mechanical noises. Descriptions of starling song in the past reflect the difficulty of describing all the variety of sounds included. Witherby mentioned a “lively rambling melody of throaty warbling, chiring, clicking and gurgling notes interspersed with musical whistles and pervaded by a peculiar creaking quality.”
This complexity explains why detailed studies of starling song have delayed long after the arrival of the sound spectrograph. As mentioned by West & King, “the problem with starlings is that they vocalized too much, too often and in too great numbers, sometimes in choruses numbering in the thousands. Even the seemingly elementary step of creating an accurate catalogue of the vocal repertoire of wild starlings is an intimidating task because of the variety of their sounds.”
Chaiken have compared the sons of young males raised in different social conditions: either with a wild-caught adult song tutor, individually housed but tape-tutored by a tape-recording or raised in total isolation. All birds had been taken from the nest at an early age (8-10 days) and were hand raised. Untutored birds produced mostly an abnormal song, where even the basic organization of song was missing. In contrast, both tape- and live-tutored birds developed songs with a normal basic organization, but with some syntactical abnormalities for the tape-tutored birds. Tape-tutored birds had repertoires half as large as those of live-tutored birds. Large differences occurred between both groups of birds in their … |
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