Males do the singing and females do the listening. This has been the established, even cherished view of courtship in birds, but now some ornithologists are changing tune.
László Garamszegi of the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and colleagues studied the literature on 233 European songbird species. Of the 109 for which information on females was available, they found evidence for singing in 101 species. In only eight species could the team conclude that females did not sing.
Females that sing have been overlooked, the team say, because either their songs are quiet, they are mistaken for males from their…
