Taking turns: The neural control of birdsong duets.

Every animal communication enthusiast has a story about a peak experience. It might be hearing whales sing while snorkeling or seeing fireflies flash synchronously in their thousands. My peak experience was when I first heard wrens sing antiphonal duets. It was my first time in the tropics, on Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, when I was a graduate student. On my first day in the rainforest I heard a complex, beautifully melodic song coming from what I thought was a single bird that insisted on hiding in the dense foliage. After a sweaty hour of creeping through the understory in search of this elusive bird, I paused under the large leaves of a heliconia to heed the call of nature. I was rewarded by now hearing that same song in perfect stereo, with alternating syllables coming from my right and left, and realized that I was hearing two birds sing with such precise coordination that they sounded like one bird when singing next to each other. Remaining under cover allowed me to finally see the male and female riverside wrens ( Cantorchilus semibadius ) that produced these wonderful duets (https://ebird.org/species/rivwre1). Antiphonal duets occur in different avian taxa, mostly found in the tropics, and are characterized by rapid alternation of vocal production by two or more birds, with millisecond precision. While antiphonal duetting behavior has been studied since the pioneering research of Thorpe on African boubou shrikes in the mid-1900s, how the brain integrates the motor production of song by one bird with auditory sensory input from its partner’s song was unknown. Coleman et al. have now provided insight into the neural mechanisms underlying this extraordinary form of coordinated display behavior in their paper “Neurophysiological coordination of duet singing” (1). Song duetting is an elaborated form of coordinated communication behavior, in which two … [↵][1]1Email: eliotb{at}uw.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1