“Does this mean red-winged blackbirds understand that the call is specific to cowbirds or are they just responding to a general alarm?” said graduate student Shelby Lawson, who led the study with Mark Hauber, a professor of evolution, ecology and behavior at the U. of I. The researchers sought to answer that question by playing back the calls of several bird species in warbler and blackbird territories to see how the birds reacted.
They report their findings in the journal Communications Biology.
“We know that eavesdropping on the calls of other species is common across the animal kingdom,” Lawson said. “Birds do it. Mammals do it. There are studies of different primates that do it – and even birds that listen in when they do.”
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