{"id":1956,"date":"2010-05-08T13:42:47","date_gmt":"2010-05-08T19:42:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/?p=1956"},"modified":"2016-11-25T08:33:59","modified_gmt":"2016-11-25T14:33:59","slug":"song-of-smudgy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/archives\/1956","title":{"rendered":"Song of Smudgy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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"Smudgy," the first documented hybrid Black x Eastern Phoebe, Larimer County, CO, 4\/26\/2007. Photo by Rachel Hopper; used with permission. Click to enlarge.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 2007, an odd-looking flycatcher set up a territory above a diversion dam along the Big Thompson River in Loveland, Colorado.\u00a0 It was clearly a phoebe, but what kind of phoebe, the first few observers couldn’t seem to decide.<\/p>\n

Eventually, after puzzling over some internet photos of the smudgy-breasted bird, Nick Komar suggested that it could be a hybrid — one parent a Black Phoebe, the other an Eastern Phoebe.\u00a0 As soon as Nick’s suggestion landed in my email inbox, I knew I had to get sound recordings.\u00a0 For one thing, if it was truly a hybrid, then it was well worth documenting, because hybridization had never been reported among phoebes before.\u00a0 For another thing, I knew that a microphone trained on a hybrid flycatcher would open a unique window directly into the bird’s genetic code.<\/p>\n

Why?\u00a0 Because unlike most other passerines, flycatchers don’t learn their songs.\u00a0 In a series of classic experiments in the 1980s, Donald Kroodsma raised Willow and Alder Flycatchers<\/a> and Eastern Phoebes<\/a> in the laboratory and determined that even if they were raised hearing only the wrong songs, or even if raised in complete silence, the birds all grew up to sing almost exactly like their parents.<\/p>\n

This does not happen with most passerine birds.\u00a0 If you raise a finch or a junco without exposure to finch or junco songs, the bird might learn the wrong song, or it might grow up to sing incoherent babbles, but it definitely won’t sing like “normal” wild members of its species.\u00a0 Most birds with complex songs need tutoring and time to learn them — but not flycatchers.\u00a0 Every part of their vocal repertoire is somehow coded in their genes.\u00a0 Which means that if the genes of two species were to mix, one would expect to hear some sort of hybrid song.<\/p>\n

Here’s what a normal Eastern Phoebe sounds like:<\/p>\n

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Eastern Phoebe song, McCurtain County, OK, 3\/22\/2008.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nhttp:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/EAPHs-NDP2008-11-04.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

And here’s a normal Black Phoebe:<\/p>\n

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Black Phoebe song, Humboldt County, CA, 3\/27\/2009.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nhttp:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/BLPHs-NDP2009-08-06.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

Birds with innate songs don’t usually show much geographic variation; they don’t have regional “dialects” the way that, for example, White-crowned Sparrows<\/a> do.\u00a0 Therefore, in theory, Eastern Phoebes and Black Phoebes from all across their North American range should produce spectrograms that closely match the ones above.<\/p>\n

That’s why, when I saw the spectrograms of the bird from Loveland, I knew we were dealing with a hybrid:<\/p>\n

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Song of hybrid Black x Eastern Phoebe, Larimer County, CO, 5\/2\/2007.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nhttp:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/NDP2007-SmudgySong-5-2.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

But “Smudgy,” as some of us called him, didn’t just mix up the pieces of Black and Eastern Phoebe songs.\u00a0 His song behavior was even stranger than one might expect from a hybrid.<\/p>\n

For one thing, while Black and Eastern Phoebes both usually sing by alternating two different songtypes, Smudgy had three to choose from — like a Say’s Phoebe, the only species in the genus that had not<\/em> given him genes.\u00a0 In addition, the introductory notes in Smudgy’s song were poorly stereotyped — that is, they weren’t always carbon copies of one another, but instead varied slightly with each delivery.\u00a0 However, the terminal portions of his songs were<\/em> stereotyped.\u00a0 Furthermore, the different parts of Smudgy’s songs seemed to show different levels of influence from the parent species.<\/p>\n

Why in the world would a hybrid sing like this?\u00a0 To know for sure, we’ll need more recordings of hybrid phoebes.<\/p>\n

Hybrids appear to be on the increase, particularly in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, where the northeasterly range expansion of Black Phoebe has started bringing it into sympatry with the westward-surging Eastern — but an apparent Black\u00a0\u00d7 Say’s showed up in northern California, and it’s worth noting that “Smudgy” was found at least 150 miles outside the range of either of his parent species.\u00a0 Since hybridity may well scramble the migration genes as well as the song genes, a hybrid phoebe may be possible almost anywhere on the continent.<\/p>\n

In Ca\u00f1on City, Colorado, smack-dab in the center of the contact zone between Black and Eastern Phoebes, SeEtta Moss has begun finding her own hybrid phoebes.\u00a0 She recently posted photos [1<\/a> 2<\/a>] and\u00a0 a video clip<\/a> of a definite hybrid, as well as photos of another possible hybrid<\/a> (perhaps a backcross).\u00a0 Here’s the spectrogram of the definite hybrid (using the audio from her video clip):<\/p>\n

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Song of hybrid Black x Eastern Phoebe, Fremont County, CO, 4\/9\/2010. Audio from video by SeEtta Moss (click for link).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nhttp:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/05\/SeEttaMoss_pBLPHxEAPH.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

As you can see, this bird sings differently than Smudgy, which raises even more questions.\u00a0 As our sample of hybrid recordings grows, we may be able to discover some really fascinating things — not just about how genes control song, but also about how song evolved in these birds.\u00a0 More on that coming soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2007, an odd-looking flycatcher set up a territory above a diversion dam along the Big Thompson River in Loveland, Colorado. “Smudgy,” as some of us called the hybrid Black x Eastern Phoebe, displayed song behavior even stranger than one might expect from a hybrid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,180],"tags":[134,132,136,135,133,137],"class_list":["post-1956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hybrid-birds","category-song-learning","tag-black-phoebe","tag-eastern-phoebe","tag-says-phoebe","tag-sayornis-nigricans","tag-sayornis-phoebe","tag-sayornis-saya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1956"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5078,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956\/revisions\/5078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}