![]() ![]() A dazzling exploration of lives lived on the fringes of civilisation, Swamp Songs is a vital reappraisal and vibrant celebration of people and environments closely intertwined. Swamp Im going down down down, down in the swamp Better turn back around You cant get free Youll drown in misery. Taught by a mischievous linguist, Mr Dolittle the. And of carp soup, tiger gods, flamingos and floods. Down at the murky lagoon, Amphibians splash in the mud, And croak out cheeky songs, That echo around the wood. Here are tales of shepherds, smugglers and salt-gatherers of mangroves and machismo, frogs and fishermen. In Swamp Songs, Tom Blass journeys through a series of such watery landscapes, from Romney Marsh to North Carolina, from Lapland to the Danube Delta and on to the Bay of Bengal, encountering those whose very existence has been shaped by wetlands, their myths and hidden histories. We have tried to drain away their demons and tame them, destroying their fragile beauty, botany and birdlife, along with the carefully calibrated lives of those who have come to understand and thrive in them. For centuries, they – and their inhabitants – have been the object of our distrust. Studies have shown that this type of fragmentation can hinder cultural transmission between songbird populations.įarnsworth says he hopes future research will “evolve from this line of work,” adding “the notion of passing down cultural traditions is obviously something we as humans hold dear, and seeing the potential for it in other organisms is super cool.'Bracingly original' Kathryn Hughes, Guardian Oozing with bad airs, boggarts and other spirits, the world's marshes and swamps are often seen as sinister, permanently twilit – and only partly of this earth. Introducing man-made barriers, such as cities, roads, and plantations, into an animal's habitat, can turn a unified population into a collection of isolated groups that rarely interact. “It’s really exciting,” says Andrew Farnsworth, an ornithologist with Cornell University.“Having this approach and these findings as a baseline against which to compare a changing reality of habitat fragmentation and loss is really important.” ![]() This study is among the first to assess the longevity of song traditions within a bird species, and its findings provide a baseline for scientists to measure the impact of habitat loss on the cultural evolution of songbirds. The song-types that you hear in the marshes of North America today may well have been there 1,000 years ago,” says Lachlan. “With those two ingredients together, you end up with traditions that are really stable. Lachlan says that the combination of the birds’ “conformist bias” and their ability to so precisely mimic their elders allows them to create traditions that persist unchanged for centuries. “We were able to show that swamp sparrows very rarely make mistakes when they learn their songs, and they don't just learn songs at random, they pick up commoner songs rather than rarer songs,” says Robert Lachlan, a biologist at Queen Mary University of London and the study’s lead author. The team reports the findings Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications. Now, scientists suggest that these sparrows preserve their cultural traditions as efficiently as humans do, if not more so. The young sparrows mimic the songs sung by their elders so accurately that their musical repertoire has remained relatively unchanged for all that time. Scientists have discovered evidence that the American swamp sparrow, Melospiza georgiana, has likely been singing the same songs for a millennium. In fact, they haven’t changed their set list in more than 1,000 years, according to a new study. These little brown birds may know just a few songs, but they know them well. Every summer, the melodic whistles of thousands of American swamp sparrows echo across North America’s wetlands.
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