Song structure and organization in Southern House Wrens (Troglodytes aedon).

EDNEI B DOS SANTOS; D. RENDALL; PAULO E. LLAMBIAS

Princeton

Congreso; 51st Annual Animal Behavior Society Conference; 2014

Animal Behavioral Society

House Wrens (Troglodytes aedon) have the widest distribution of any songbird in the western hemisphere, distributed from central latitudes in Canada to Tierra del Fuego. While subject to revision, disparate populations across this range are currently recognized as a single species. At the same time, they show considerable variation in mating system, migratory behavior and life-history patterns, for example being almost entirely migratory and more frequently polygynous with large clutch sizes in North America but sedentary and substantially monogamous with small clutch sizes in most of South America. House Wrens are thus ideally suited to quantifying adaptive behavioral flexibility and to testing the role played by male song in variable mating systems and in potential geographic sub-structuring of populations. Here we present a first detailed description of song structure and organization in a South American population of House Wrens based on an analysis of 13,000 songs recorded from 22 males breeding in Mendoza, Argentina. We provide a comparison with song patterns and mating systems of a population of House Wren wrens studied concurrently in Alberta, Canada.