This is a That's a female Northern Cardinal, and here's a female Venezuelan troopial. Many people assume that male songbirds are the ones doing the crooning, but more than

660 species of songbirds are known in which the females sing as well. And there are still 3,500

species of songbird in which the female singing status is unknown, which implies

that there could be plenty more female singers to be found.

We often talk to people, both people who are scientists and ornithologists, but also people

who are birders and citizen scientists who say,

yeah, you know, I have this story where a female was clearly singing.

Biologist Lauren Benedict of the University of Northern Colorado.

These field reports inspired Benedict and Cornell behavioral

ecologist Karen Odom to start the Female Bird Song Project with a group of

colleagues in 2017. The goal is to get professional researchers and citizen scientists

alike to submit recordings and field notes of Bird Song from both males and females.

And we're hoping to really give them ways to report that and document it

so that we can aggregate that information in useful ways.

On the project's website female birdsong.org you can hear various birds of both sexes

and complex duets sung by pairs of songbirds like these black-bellied rims. Now Benedict and Odom are asking scientists to consider the existence of female bird song in their research, even when it's not their primary focus.

For example, from studying avian neurobiology to collecting population data for bird conservation.

They wrote up their goals in the journal The Auk Ornithological Advances.

Studying Female Bird Song is no simple task. Here's Karen Odom.

So the biggest thing is to see the bird, which is number one, not trivial, and number

two in the past since bird's own has been thought of as a male trait.

It might not be that researchers were always verifying the sex of the bird by finding it and

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