See Ted? This is violence. :)
--- On Sun, 6/22/08, Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:
>
> June 20 2008
> Financial Times
>
> Birds' nests are going for a song
> By Alan Cane
>
> It's just another snatch of birdsong to humans, but to
> avian home-makers it's
> as convincing a residential description as any estate
> agent's pitch. Scientists
> have discovered that some migratory songbirds settle on
> where to set up home by
> listening to the singing of others that have successfully
> raised a family in a
> particular habitat.
>
> So powerful is the message, they have found, that
> recordings of birdsong can
> persuade migrants to settle in unsuitable places.
>
> Matthew Betts of Oregon State University (OSU), who led the
> research into the
> behaviour of the black-throated blue warbler in the White
> Mountains of New
> Hampshire in the US, said that finding the right habitat in
> which to breed was
> a matter of life and death to most birds: "They
> don't live a long time and they
> need to get it right first time," he said.
>
> The OSU research contradicts conventional wisdom, which
> holds that vegetation
> is the most important factor for birds selecting breeding
> grounds. Prof Betts
> and his team found that male birds were four times more
> likely to follow the
> cues provided by song than their own observations of the
> physical environment
> and that the females, "too trusting for their own
> good", followed them despite
> their having made a poor choice.
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