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University of Windsor
Song contests source of fascination for avian researcher
David Wilson can’t help being fascinated by the way male black-capped chickadees try to outdo one another and impress potential mating partners. Rather than resort to crude demonstrations of brute strength like many other species, the tiny birds rely on a more refined and sophisticated method to prove their worthiness: they have song contests.~
“They’re very simple songs but they contain a lot of detailed information,” said Dr. Wilson, who was recently awarded a two-year post-doctoral fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. “The females eavesdrop on those contests and they choose mates based on what’s in the message.”
Wilson will work in biological sciences under the supervision of associate professor Dan Mennill studying the way the provincial bird of New Brunswick communicates and how signalling strategies affect its reproduction.
The birds can be found in smaller numbers in this area, but are more plentiful at a station near Chaffey’s Lock, northeast of Kingston. There, Wilson and his colleagues record the warbles of the chickadee, trap the birds and colour band them. The scientists observe their mate selection process and then take blood samples from newly-born chicks to study their DNA and determine their parentage.
“That helps to understand whether the more dominant singers have greater reproductive success rate,” said Wilson, a native of Manitou, Manitoba, who earned his master’s degree at the University of Manitoba and his PhD at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
Wilson said the birds are fairly common so they’re easier to study and added that the knowledge gained from his research might be used to develop conservation and species management strategies for other birds that are endangered.
“It’s very important to understand how these birds fit into the ecosystem,” he said. “This research provides a little window into their world and lets you assess their level of dominance and their overall reproductive ecology.”
My little chickadee: NSERC post-doctoral fellow David Wilson befriends a black-capped chickadee at a research station near Kingston.