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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. Today on the podcast, learning about birdsong

song from chirps and cheaps captured by birders around the world.

You could think of it, for example, if you had an orchestra with lots and lots of different types of instruments, really rich orchestra.

Birds are the virtuosos of the animal kingdom. I mean, they can make a remarkable range of sounds. But why is a bard owl more of a tenor?

While a cedar waxwing is more of a soprano.

My next guest analyzed 100,000 bird sounds from all over the world to try to peck out some kernels of knowledge about what determines a bird's vocal range and the sounds that they make.

Joining me now is one of the study authors, Dr. Zuzana Buzovaleva, Assistant Professor of Forest and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, based in Madison, Wisconsin.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi, thank you for having me.

Okay, so you analyzed 100,000 bird sounds.

Where did they come from?

So in this research, which was actually led by a PhD student in my lab, Satya Chandrasagar,

we analyzed more than 100,000 recordings that came from this amazing repository of birds' sounds called Xenocanto.

And this repository is where anyone can upload sounds of birds that they

encounter in the forest, in their backyard, or anywhere. Wow. So these are birders who made this

data set that you used. Yes, they're birders, they're a citizen scientist, they're nature lovers.

Anyone can upload recordings. And they're fromers, they're citizen scientists, they're nature lovers. Anyone can upload recordings.

And they're from around the world?

Yes, they're from around the world.

They are from every single continent, biome.

Obviously, there are some areas that are better represented than others,

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