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bird groups have innate vocalizations. So the calls of loons, ducks and geese, shorebirds, gulls, pigeons, owls, woodpeckers, etc. are not learned. Of the songbirds (order Passeriformes), few have innate songs. One group that does is the New World tyrant flycatchers, including the familiar eastern phoebe that makes the familiar repeated “fee-bee” call.
So the variations in the songs of white-throated sparrows may simply reflect differences in the way songs were originally learned. Just as a person’s Brooklyn accent tells us something about his upbringing, the songs of our sparrows tell us something about their individual histories.
It is a reminder to us that every organism has its own unique beginning, life history and destiny.
We see and hear whitethroated sparrows every winter, but we have no real sense of them as individuals. Their songs are as much as we have to distinguish one from the other and we plan to try to do just that.
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