A couple of winters ago, I recorded a Grey Wagtail (Motacilla cinerea) singing in Bengaluru. The video generated ample interest among birders as the bird is a winter visitor to the southern Indian subcontinent. And that’s because singing, as we understand it, is a breeding behaviour. And by this time of the year, the bird has completed its breeding season. It also raised important questions that urged revisiting what we know about winter migration and bird behaviour.
First, some context. Birds sing and call for specific reasons. Calls may serve as contact communication between a pair of birds, or among members of a flock. Parents and offspring may communicate through specific calls. Calls may serve to inform other members of the species, or even other species in the cases of mixed foraging flocks, of the location of food sources. And, of course, alarm calls alert other birds of the same or different species of the presence of predators.
Bird songs are distinct from calls, in that they follow specific patterns of vocalisation, with notes often repeated in a sequence.
Bird calls versus bird songs
Bird songs are distinct from calls, in that they follow specific patterns of vocalisation, with notes often repeated in a sequence. Often, the bird may repeat these notes frequently in closely similar patterns. Many bird songs sound melodious to the human ear. Often, the singer may enrich songs with mimicry (like this Oriental Magpie-Robin), or it may interweave the calls of other species, or even other sounds (lyrebirds, for instance, mimic mechanical sounds like car engines and camera shutters). Functionally, the most common kinds of songs are courtship songs and territorial songs, and most birds sing predominantly while they are breeding. In some species, the breeding season is specific to certain times of the year, while others may breed year round, and therefore the songs may or may not follow a seasonal pattern. And, of course, many species of birds do not sing at all.
For long, we assumed that male birds do all the singing, but recent research has challenged this inherent bias with evidence that females of at least 60% of bird species have their own song patterns. In the case of birds where sexes are similar in appearance, it’s often hard for human observers to tell if it is the male or female bird that is singing.
In my own backyard in Bengaluru, I have observed two species in which the sexes exhibit distinct, often complementary songs: the Oriental Magpie-Robin (Copsychus saularis) and the Asian Koel (Eudynamys scolopaceus).
For long, we assumed that male birds do all the singing, but recent research has challenged this inherent bias with evidence that females of at least 60% of bird species have their own song patterns
Was this Grey Wagtail an off-season singer?
Wintering Grey Wagtails usually begin to arrive in southern India as early as late August and early September, being quite widespread by October. We can hear their sharp tzi-tzi calls right through the season up until April, when the birds start returning to their breeding grounds. So, armed with all this information, let’s ponder the question: Why was a Grey Wagtail, so far away from its breeding grounds, singing? Note that many species of wintering birds, including certain species of warblers, demonstrate this rather odd behaviour. I have on occasion recorded wintering Sykes’s Warblers and Blyth’s Reed-warblers singing in winter.
Singing is hard work and consumes a fair bit of energy, which makes sense a breeding bird in the season. So, it’s hard to say why this particular Grey Wagtail was singing when, going by all the knowledge we have, it had no business doing so. Note that I recorded this on October 16, 2021 in Bengaluru, which is early winter.
Was the Grey Wagtail rehearsing its song? Or was it yielding to a bout of nostalgia? Or maybe it was protecting its wintering territory from rivals. A sound explanation is perhaps that singing off-season is a kind of riyaaz, a way to hone singing skills and improve song quality to be ready when the breeding season kicks in.
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So, the next time you hear a wintering bird sing, listen. You’re probably in the presence of an avian Ed Sheeran or Luciano Pavarotti, depending on which one floats your boat.
- TL;DR – Why did the wintering Grey Wagtail sing? - February 9, 2025
- Pranayama with Bar-headed Geese – A Pilgrimage in Gadag - January 10, 2025
- 2024 – The Year The Green Ogre Breathed Again! - December 29, 2024
