Wine-throated Hummingbird (Atthis ellioti)

Thurber, Walter A.; Schulenberg, Thomas S.; Sedgwick, Carolyn W.

doi:10.2173/bow.withum1.01

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“…Furthermore, their relatively small body sizes may lower the energetic requirements for dives and modified wings may facilitate maneuverability (Payne 1984;Clark et al 2011). Interestingly, bumblebee hummingbird (Atthis heloisa) and wine-throated hummingbird (Atthis ellioti) which inhabit forests, pine-oak woodlands, and neighboring shrubby areas (Arizmendi et al 2020;Thurber et al 2020) are non-diving and regained singing (Clark et al 2018). Overall, the expansion of bees to North America and consequent occupation of open habitats combined with their anatomical specializations might have favored the enhancement of visual displays and associated mechanical sounds.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Absence of song suggests heterogeneity of vocal-production learning in hummingbirds

2023

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Hummingbirds have been recognized, along with songbirds and parrots, as capable of learning songs. However, it is still unclear whether singing can be treated as a homologous trait within the family, analogous to songbirds. Therefore, we systematically compared the information about hummingbird vocalizations in the literature in a phylogenetic framework. In general, songs were emitted by perching males in a reproductive context, while calls were mainly in agonistic contexts. Singing was ancestral in most of the nine major hummingbird clades, but has been lost at least once in the mountain gem clade and twice in the bee clade. This evolutionary loss of singing might suggest heterogeneity of vocal-production learning.

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