Unrecognisable Love Songs

Saddlebacks, native to the North Island, seem to have developed various regional ‘accents’ over the last 5 years after humans relocated the species to small island refuges to aid in their preservation, accents which now may be unrecognisable to members of other groups — making an otherwise appealing courtship melody sound like an unbecoming jumble. The phenomenon is an avian equivalent of the way human language develops regional accents and dialects as people migrate and settle in new locations, and provides fresh insights into how species evolve, says biology researcher Dr Kevin Parker, from the Institute of Natural Sciences at Albany. “In humans, love overcomes language barriers, but in many bird species if you sing the wrong song, you are out on your own,” Parker says. The Saddleback, or Tieke, was first described by German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in 1789.