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November 10, 2005
Hearing and the Bird Ear
One of the endearing and endlessly fascinating things about birds is their song. Nearly all birds make some noises. Sound, as a prelude to, and part of, courtship, as a means of simply staying in touch with the flock. As a way of identifying either your young or your parents and as an efficient method of sending out a quick warning of approaching danger is an integral part of both a birds and a bird watchers life. Naturally enough if birds are using sound as a means to communicate then they need to be able to hear as well as create sounds. For this, they have, like you and me, ears.
Birds have good ears but they tend to hear things differently to us. Within sounds birds recognise and remember something akin to absolute pitch whereas humans perceive sounds via relative pitch. Very few humans can hear and remember absolute pitch. Relative pitch however allows us to hear a tune in one octave and still recognise the tune in a different octave. Birds cannot do this. Birds do however recognise 'timbre' (a fundamental note combined with harmonies). Recognising timbre and harmonic variations gives birds great versatility in the sounds that they can respond to, and in some cases reproduce. Birds also hear shorter notes than we can. Humans process sounds in bytes about 1/20 of a second long whereas birds discriminate up to 1/200 of a second. This means where we hear one sound only, a bird may hear as many as ten separate notes. Some birds such as Pigeons can hear much lower sounds than us. Birds (Pigeons) can be music buffs and can distinguish between human composers such as Bach and Stravinsky.
Please read the rest of this facinating article here.
Posted by sue at November 10, 2005 10:11 AM