By Susan Milius
“You’ve got to suffer if you want to sing the blues” may apply to mockingbirds too.
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In the Mimidae family, of mockingbirds and thrashers, the species with the more elaborate male courtship songs tend to be those living in the more challenging climates, says Carlos Botero of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, N.C.
Virtuoso birdsong, Botero explains, means precision in repeated elements, abundant variety in tweets and trills plus dead-on mimicry of other sounds, whether from neighboring bird species or car alarms. Mockingbird species that excel in such performance tend to breed in zones of hard-to-predict and highly variable temperature and precipitation, Botero and his colleagues report online May 21 in Current Biology.