Equipment for birdsong collection, playback and analysis

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This proposal requests sound equipment necessary for recording, playing, and analysing vocalizations of songbirds for an ongoing research program on acoustic perception. Previous research on song has primarily focused on song production in males and how experience with adult vocalizations is necessary for young male birds to learn to produce species-appropriate vocalizations, especially song. Perception of song and other vocalizations, and the effects of early experience on perception, especially in females has been studied far less. I use both behavioural and neural measures to examine response to vocalizations in black-capped chickadees and other species to study how the bird processes information in acoustic signals, whether there are differences in how vocalizations are processed by males and females, by young and adult birds, and by normally and isolate-reared birds. I also examine the effects of seasonality on perception, for example, whether vocalizations appropriate to the season (i.e. song in spring) are processed differently than vocalizations inappropriate to the season (i.e. song in fall). This equipment will allow me to play sounds to birds in both the field and the lab in order to study their behavioural (e.g. vocalizations) and neural (e.g. immediate-early gene activity) responses to song, and to record these responses for analyses and use as stimuli in future experiments. It will be a critical and integral set of equipment for research in this laboratory and will gain year-round use by students completing both graduate and undergraduate degrees.