Vocally warming up puts more dazzle into a bird's singing for the day, a new test shows, perhaps helping to explain outbursts of birdsong at dawn.Males of Puerto Rico's Adelaide's warblers (Setopnaga adelaidae) start trilling through their repertoires of 30 or so songs while it's still pitch black. Tracking the songs of individual males showed that the order of performance had a strong effect on performance quality, behavioral ecologist David Logue of the University of Lethbridge in Canada said August 17. In the early versions of particular songs, males didn't quickly change pitch as well as they did later, Logue and colleagues found.
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