New research from the University of Oxford has provided fresh insights into how bird songs evolve over time, revealing a significant role for population dynamics in shaping song diversity and change. The findings – based on an analysis of over 100,000 bird songs – have been published today in the journal Current Biology.

The researchers spent three years collecting over twenty thousand hours of sound recordings from a wild population of great tits (Parus major) in Oxfordshire, which has been studied for the past 77 years as part of the Wytham Great Tit study. Their aim was to investigate how the movement, age, and turnover of birds within a population influences the diversity and evolution of their songs – including which songs become locally popular, which fade away, and how varied their song repertoires become.

To achieve this, they used a new approach involving training an AI model to recognise individual birds based on their songs alone and measure song differences between individuals. This method allowed them to track variations in song repertoires across the population and uncover patterns in song evolution.