Female song in Costa's Hummingbird (Calypte costae) Authors: Christopher J. Clark, David Rankin, and Katherine Johnson Source: The Wilson Journal of Ornithology, 130(4) : 987-992 Published By: The Wilson Ornithological Society URL: https://doi.org/10.1676/1559-4491.130.4.987 BioOne Complete (complete.BioOne.org) is a full-text database of 200 subscribed and open-access titles in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences published by nonprofit societies, associations, museums, institutions, and presses. Your use of this PDF, the BioOne Complete website, and all posted and associated content indicates your acceptance of BioOne’s Terms of Use, available at www.bioone.org/terms-of-use. Usage of BioOne Complete content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercial use. Commercial inquiries or rights and permissions requests should be directed to the individual publisher as copyright holder. BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research. Downloaded From: https://bioone.org/journals/The-Wilson-Journal-of-Ornithology on 20 Sep 2019 Terms of Use: https://bioone.org/terms-of-use Access provided by University of California Riverside Short Communications 987 Rivera-Milan´ FF. 1992. Distribution and relative abundance of feral sheep (Ovis aries) and stout iguana (Cyclura patterns of columbids in Puerto Rico. Condor. 94:224– pinguis) on Guana Island, British Virging Islands. 238. IRCF Reptiles and Amphibians. 20:7–15. Rivera-Milan´ FF. 1995. Spatial and temporal variation in the Steadman DW, Montambault JR, Robinson SK, Oswalt SN, detectability and density of columbids in Puerto Rico and on Vieques Island. Ornitologia Neotropical. 6:1– Brandeis TJ, et al. 2009. 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Clark,1* David Rankin,1 and Katherine Johnson1 ABSTRACT—Bird song has been extensively studied in Sus vocalizaciones se asemejan al canto de los machos y fueron oscine passerines, but far less is known about song in producidos, sin direccion,´ en territorios justo antes del inicio de la hummingbirds, which are distantly related to passerines. estacion´ reproductiva. Ambas aves fueron confirmadas como Song is generally thought of as a male trait. Here we hembras y no machos juveniles, que se parecen a las hembras: una ten´ıa un ovario agrandado y la otra puso huevos. Nuestros document song in 2 wild female Costa’s Hummingbirds resultados implican que al menos algunas hembras de colibr´ı (Calypte costae) of 10 examined. Their vocalizations closely pueden aprender cantos tan bien como los machos y tienen resembled male song and were produced, undirected, on capacidades de canto similares a las de estos.´ La funcion,´ si existe, territories just prior to the breeding season. Both birds were del canto en hembras no es inmediatamente clara. El canto de las confirmed as female and not young males, which resemble hembras parece ser ma´s raro en esta poblacion´ que aquel de los females: one had an enlarged ovary, and the other laid eggs. machos y por ello fa´cil de ignorar. La presencia del canto en Our results imply that at least some female hummingbirds hembras podr´ıa ser un fenomeno´ que ha pasado desapercibido en may learn song as well as males and have similar song otras especies de colibr´ıes. capacity as males. The function, if any, of female song was Palabras clave: Aprendizaje, canto en hembras, colibr´ı, not immediately clear. Female song seemed rarer in this Trochilidae, vocalizacion.´ population than in males and thus easy to overlook. Presence of female song could also be an overlooked phenomenon in other hummingbird species. Received 3 July 2017. Accepted 27 July 2018. Hummingbirds and oscine passerines share a Key words: female song, hummingbird, learning, Trochilidae, vocalization. number of similarities in the biology of song. Because these 2 clades are distantly related (Prum et al. 2015), these similarities have apparently ´ Canto en las hembras del colibrı Calypte costae evolved convergently. We define song as a RESUMEN (Spanish)—El canto de las aves ha sido estudiado vocalization broadcast in an undirected fashion extensivamente en las paserinas oscinas, pero se sabe mucho menos from a defended territory, whereas calls are either del canto de los colibr´ıes, que esta´n lejanamente emparentados de las paserinas. El canto se concibe generalmente como una cualidad only directed at other individuals or are given in a de los machos. Aqu´ı documentamos el canto de dos hembras variety of contexts rather than in a primarily ´ silvestres del colibrı Calypte costae de un total de 10 examinadas. territorial context. Although this definition would 1Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal pose problems for some vocalizations made by Biology, University of California, Riverside, CA, USA members of other bird clades, it isolates songs as a *Corresponding author: [email protected] distinct type of vocalization in the ‘‘bee’’ hum- Downloaded From: https://bioone.org/journals/The-Wilson-Journal-of-Ornithology on 20 Sep 2019 Terms of Use: https://bioone.org/terms-of-use Access provided by University of California Riverside 988 The Wilson Journal of Ornithology Vol. 130, No. 4, December 2018 mingbirds (Mellisugini; Clark et al. 2018). Song is Methods socially learned from conspecifics in humming- DTR discovered a singing female-plumaged birds (Baptista and Schuchmann 1990, Araya- Costa’s Hummingbird (hereafter: female #1) hold- Salas and Wright 2013), just as it is in oscines. ing a feeding territory in the UCR botanical gardens Singing is usually associated with breeding on 4 November 2016. Several other Costa’s territoriality and, in temperate oscines, is often Hummingbirds held territories in the immediate thought of as performed by males but not females. vicinity, including at least 2 adult males that also However, this belief could be caused by ascertain- sang. Recordings of song were made with a Telinga ment bias, in which female song is present but Pro parabola with a Sennheiser MKH 20 and a unreported; recent work has suggested that female Sound Devices 702 24-bit recorder from distances song in oscines is widespread and ancestral (Odom as close as 2 m. Songs were cross-correlated with et al. 2014, Webb et al. 2016). Here, we document typical male songs in the software Raven 1.5 (www. 2 individual female Costa’s Hummingbirds (Ca- birds.cornell.edu/raven). Videos were recorded with lypte costae) singing in an undirected fashion from Canon VIXIA HF R500 Digital Camcorder. territories held prior to the breeding season. We recorded a single 1-hour time budget in the Costa’s Hummingbirds are year-round residents morning to document the presence of singing and on the University of California, Riverside (UCR) other behaviors relevant to ascertaining whether this campus. In late fall, females hold feeding territo- was a typical bird, such as whether it performed or ries near blooming flowers in areas where they received courtship displays. To examine whether later nest (nesting begins in approximately Jan). other female Costa’s Hummingbirds sang, we After breeding ends in approximately June, the located and recorded comparable single time birds then hold feeding territories centered on budgets between 0900 and 1030 h (PST) for 9 flowers. Adults molt from approximately June to additional female Costa’s Hummingbirds holding October (Baltosser and Scott 1996) while hatch- prebreeding territories between 15 November and year (HY) birds may molt later than adults (Pyle et 21 December 2016. We also made more extensive al. 1997), sometimes as late as January (CJC, DR, casual (untimed) observations of some of these pers. obs). While adult males are easily identified females. In all cases, our formal time budget was by their plumage, HY birds resemble adult representative of these further informal observa- females. Thus, young pre-molt males can be tions: birds that never sang during formal observa- confused with adult females. tions also never sang during informal observations. To test the hypothesis that female #1 was male, Adult males sing year-round (Baltosser and on 29 November 2016 we collected and prepared Scott 1996, Williams and Houtman 2008). HY her as a study skin (collector number CJC #412, males begin to sing soon after fledging, and while specimen currently housed at UCR) and examined their initial subsongs are variable and distinctive her gonads. A second singing female (female #2) from adult male song, over the next few months was caught, color marked, banded (band number: this subsong coalesces into adult song as they go K53146), and released. through the stages of song learning (KJ and CJC unpubl.). Thus, when in November we detected a female-plumaged bird singing a male-like song, Results the most prosaic possibility was that the singer was The singing birds were female actually male, for instance a young male that was Female #1’s phenotype was that of a typical late to molt but had already developed adult song, female (Supplemental Video 1; https://youtu.be/ or an adult male that for some reason had molted k8nXVPNC1UI).