Does anyone know of a reference for finding out which species have females that sing? I know a couple of the obvious ones, like northern cardinals, but it’s not always easy to find this information - sometimes my references include it, sometimes not. I’m working on filling in the ‘sex’ annotation for my bird recordings, and don’t want to assume that a singing bird in spring is male.
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See the last figure on this page for a list of about 150: https://bioone.org/journals/the-auk/volume-135/issue-2/AUK-17-183.1/A-call-to-document-female-bird-songs--Applications-for/10.1642/AUK-17-183.1.full?tab=ArticleLinkFigureTable
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It’s good that you don’t want to assume your singing birds are males! There’s lots of recent evidence that females of many species sing. This has been under-recognized in part because listeners and researchers assumed most of the songsters they heard were males…Here are a few links:
https://ebird.org/news/femalebirdsong17
https://s3.amazonaws.com/is-ebird-wordpress-prod-s3/wp-content/uploads/sites/55/Listening-to-Natures-Divas-17-2-09-R2.pdf
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-it-took-so-long-to-appreciate-female-birds-songs/
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And another link: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4379, “Female song is widespread and ancestral in songbirds,” Odom et al. 2014
@owlshead-wren @suecar Thank you! This is so interesting - I had no idea that 2/3 to 3/4 of passerine species females sing. [Heads off to edit my annotations]
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