ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
One way to tell that spring is arriving...
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS SINGING)
SHAPIRO: ...The familiar songs of birds. But birds can change their tunes as their populations evolve. At least that's what researchers at the University of Oxford have observed by studying...
NILO MERINO RECALDE: A specific species of bird, but that is very common - the great tit.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The great tit - that's the common name for the species Parus major. Outside of Oxford, there's a forest full of bird houses where scientists have studied these birds for nearly eight decades. One such researcher is Nilo Merino Recalde.
MERINO RECALDE: They are quite happy to breed in nest boxes, and this makes it a lot easier to monitor their life cycle.
SHAPIRO: For the past three years, there's been a new addition to the nest boxes - microphones. Merino Recalde recorded the birds every morning.
MERINO RECALDE: I think it was around 21,000 hours of audio, so that's, like, over a year-and-a-half of continuous audio recordings.
KELLY: AI has made combing through that kind of data possible. Merino Recalde wanted to know why bird songs change over time. He found the age of birds is quite important.
SHAPIRO: Older birds remember the songs that were popular when they were young, and younger ones can learn the oldies from elders. Groups of just young birds tend to prefer simple songs.
MERINO RECALDE: Kind of titter, titter songs that sound a bit like (whistling).
SHAPIRO: Another factor is how far the birds traveled.
MERINO RECALDE: Specifically, we see that the more birds move around within a population, the more likely they are to end up singing common songs.
KELLY: Nilo Merino Recalde says one way to think about this is they find new pop songs as they travel, but he says they also introduce the songs that are common back home.
SHAPIRO: His team's research has been published in the journal Current Biology, and while the bird microphones are off for now, he hopes other researchers will study the greatest hits of the great tits of Oxford.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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