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Baker, Myron C

Socially learned vocalizations, such as the songs of many songbirds, commonly show repertoires and geographical variation or dialects, but we have only a limited understanding of the cultural evolutionary processes that produce these patterns. In this paper we describe the singing behaviour of populations of black-capped chickadees in Fort Collins, Colorado that represents the apparent evolution of a repertoire of song types. In contrast to most black-capped chickadee singing behaviour, which consists of a single song type that is remarkably invariant across North America, chickadees throughout Fort Collins sing three acoustically distinct song types. Individual males have an average repertoire of 2.8 song types...
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