Chingolos, like other songbirds, are not born knowing how to sing. They learn their melodies by imitating adults during a key stage of their development. If the environment changes, so does their song, which evolves from generation to generation, even though it was believed to be lost.
The urban noise influenced these changes. Birds adapt their songs to overcome the background noise of traffic and constructions. They increase the volume, modify the frequency, or change the structure of their trills to make themselves heard.
This led researchers from CONICET and UBA to wonder: Could a young chingolo learn an ancient, forgotten song? To find out, they designed an experiment with synthetic sounds generated by a mathematical model of the bird’s vocal apparatus.
With an electronic tutor, they managed to teach a young chingolo a melody that had disappeared decades ago. The finding is not only novel but also opens the door to new conservation strategies based on cultural transmission.
A robotic tutor and an old song
During the pandemic, the research team initiated the project in Pereyra Iraola Park, in the province of Buenos Aires. There, they installed devices that played the ancient song, reconstructed thanks to historical records.
The sounds were designed to compete with each other and attract the attention of young chingolos. The strategy worked: by the end of the season, one of them had incorporated the melody and started to reproduce it in the next generation.
The lost song was known thanks to the notes of zoologist Fernando Nottebohm, who transcribed the species’ trills in the 1960s. Those notes allowed the recreation of the original sound, practically indistinguishable to current chingolos.
El chingolo.
The chingolo’s song as a cultural footprint
This experiment shows that not only genetic material is valuable in conservation. The species’ sound culture is also valuable. The lost chingolo song implies the loss of a part of its identity.
Each chingolo has a unique song, like a signature. Recovering an extinct melody allows not only to maintain cultural diversity but also to monitor individuals in threatened populations, such as the yellow cardinal.
Thanks to the combination of physics, biology, and technology, the song believed to be forgotten was heard again among the park’s trees. And with it, a part of the natural history of chingolos was reborn to continue being passed down from generation to generation.
