Just Duet: Science News Online, Jan. 28, 2006

Just Duet: Science News Online, Jan. 28, 2006: "As the morning mists rose on the slopes of Ecuador's Pasochoa volcano, the burbling of plain-tailed wrens came through the bamboo thickets. Two researchers started their standard procedure of catching wrens, banding them, and letting them go. Soon, however, they were startled when a small cluster of wrens settled into a bush and began singing together. It turned out to be 'one of the most complex singing performances yet described in a nonhuman animal,' says Nigel Mann."
Mann, of the State University of New York at Oneonta, and a colleague had gone to Pasochoa in the summer of 2002 as part of a team that was surveying of the 28-or-so species of the bird genus Thryothorus. That genus is famous for musical duets, in which a male and a female alternate phrases, sometimes so rapidly that it sounds like one song. Ecuador's plain-tailed wrens (Thryothorus euophrys), relatives of North America's Carolina wren, make a rhythmic, bubbling song together.