The unsung songs of great tits (Parus major): learning neighbours' songs for discrimination

Summary Many territorial birds are capable of recognising neighbours from their songs. In this paper we investigate the timing of learning of neighbours' songs for recognition. This is the first time that the timing of discrimination learning has been studied explicitly by experiment in the field. We show that discrimination learning is not limited to early life and contrast this with the timing of song learning for performance. We also show that the ability to recognise new neighbours is inversely related to the number and similarity of neighbour's songs which have previously been experienced. This suggests pro-active memory interference and provides the first field evidence for memory constraints on discrimination.