Manfred Gahr puts on a green smock and cautiously enters the aviary. The zebra finches buzz and chirp around his head, pretty little birds with red beaks and orange cheeks. Gahr stands calmly in the middle. “Listen, someone is singing,” he says suddenly and turns his head to the side. “That one over there, see him?” He picked out the singer from among two dozen voices. Everything else is apparently just chirping and palaver, but no singing. Gahr, director of the Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen, is one of the leading ornithologists in Germany and he is a bird understander.
Now, in spring, it’s chirping again from trees and roofs. A sign that nature is coming to life. But why do birds sing at all? Who sets the tone? And what do they say to each other? On the one hand there is the bridal show, says Gahr, the males want to present themselves as healthy, potent partners. On the other hand, they stake out their territory acoustically: This tree belongs to me. “Once that has been clarified, the borders will be respected by the neighbors,” explains the 63-year-old. “And at the end of June most of them run out of testosterone, then they stop singing again.”
Nevertheless, it does not become completely quiet, because in the flock of birds communication continues, as a couple, family or in groups. Hormones, muscle and brain activity, it’s all related to singing. Exactly how? The scientists and their helpers at the idyllic research location between Starnberg and Ammersee spend decades with these questions.
For two years they have also been supporting Biotopia, the team at the future natural history museum in Munich. It’s going on there again in the spring Dawn Chorus Project. Interested amateurs are invited to record the bird concert with their cell phone in the early hours of the morning and upload it to the Dawn Chorus platform. Several thousand people have already taken part. On the one hand, such a citizen science project can be used to collect data on the occurrence of certain bird species in one place. On the other hand, people learn to listen to nature. Blackbird, thrush, finch and starling – who lives on my doorstep, who is an early riser, who is a late riser, who is singing in a duet?
Such projects with the help of laypeople are only helpful if you have long-term data, says Gahr. “You always have to take measurements at the same time and in the same place.” However, the more people take part and the longer the project runs, the more reliable the results will be. If it were possible to set up acoustic bio-monitoring for a specific region in this way, “that would of course be a great idea.” Then you can draw conclusions about biodiversity based on the bird concert.
Manfred Gahr reaches into one of the nest boxes and pulls out three baby zebra finches, no bigger than his little finger. They were marked with colors to be able to tell them apart when they grew up. The researchers are interested in how the boys learn to sing. And why some become Meistersinger, while others only average.
For each chick, it is recorded when the egg was laid and when it was hatched. To distinguish them, the chicks are marked with a dab of food coloring.
(Photo: MPI for Biological Intelligence)
Only the sons learn the typical song from their fathers, says Gahr. But males and females use innate calls to communicate in the group. They are monogamous, parents usually stay together for life – infidelities included. But not all sons learn from their fathers, “some choose other lead singers,” explains Gahr as he carefully puts the little ones back in the nest. So the whole thing is quite complicated.
The biologists discovered that a specific protein in the brains of zebra finches increases their ability to learn, similar to that of mice. “There’s someone begging,” Gahr interrupts himself and turns around, “up there, the second from the right on the branch.” He can tell the difference between begging, courtship, courtship and threats.
There are birds that deceive and trick
There are around 10,000 bird species in the world, almost half of which are songbirds. While in our latitudes usually only the males sing, in the tropics the female birds also warble beautiful songs. And each individual has their own voice, just like humans. There are birds that deceive and trick by imitating strange voices; some are constantly learning new sounds and varying their singing; some species like the chaffinch “speak” regional dialects; and others produce virtuoso chants reminiscent of operatic arias. It is not for nothing that musicians have always been inspired by birdsong.
The Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, where Konrad Lorenz once studied the behavior of greylag geese, was merged with the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology in Martinsried at the beginning of the year. Together they are called now Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence. It makes sense, says Gahr, to bring neurobiological, genetic and ecological research together. Some things can only be analyzed in the laboratory, such as how a protein works in the brain. Others, like learning to sing, are best observed in nature. More exchange of disciplines can only be an advantage. And isn’t all evolution a process of learning, training, storing, applying, inheriting or passing on skills?
Gahr grew up in the Palatinate, “I spent a lot of time in the forest during my childhood,” he says. He then wanted to become a biology and mathematics teacher, but when he stood in front of a class for the first time after the first state exam, he realized: “That wasn’t for me.” He stayed at the university in Kaiserslautern and wrote a doctoral thesis on the influence of estrogen-sensitive cells on the song of canaries and zebra finches.
After four years as a junior researcher in the USA, the ornithologist came to Seewiesen for the first time in 1993 as a research group leader. He habilitated at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, was appointed professor at the University of Amsterdam, and returned to Seewiesen in 2005 as director.
“How do you want to protect nature if you don’t know it anymore?”
When walking across the grounds, past the aviaries of the funny ruffs with their raised white collars and the yellow canaries, it chirps, chirps and sings from all treetops. The institute is not open to the public except on a few days when there are guided tours. The interest is always great. Nevertheless, Gahr observes that not only school children, but also biology students can often no longer distinguish a bee from a wasp, a tit from a finch, or an oak from a beech. “Unfortunately, the system is hardly taught at the university anymore, these internships are always the first to be canceled,” he says. There are fewer and fewer chairs for zoology in Germany. Instead, new institutes for molecular biology were springing up. “It’s a dramatic development. How can you protect nature if you don’t know it anymore?”
Two zebra finches: Manfred Gahr found that not only school children, but also biology students can hardly recognize the different bird species.
(Photo: Stephan Görlich/imago)
As director, Gahr has a lot to do with administration, financing research projects, supervising doctoral theses and habilitations. “But I still enjoy visiting my researchers in the field, no matter where they are.” At home in Bavaria or in Tanzania, South Africa, Chile. A research group from Seewiesen proved that too much street noise stresses birds and that they no longer learn to sing as well. Another observed that ocean-crossing frigatebirds can sleep in flight without crashing. That could also be interesting for human brain research, says Gahr. The “Vogelschlaf” group now wants to extend their experiments to include waterfowl. Do you sleep while paddling? For this purpose – for the first time since Konrad Lorenz’ times – geese have moved back into the lake meadows, Canada geese, to be more precise.
With all the highly specialized detailed questions a scientist asks, however, one should retain a feeling for nature, says Gahr. Lying in wait in the tent for days with binoculars and a microphone, feeling the wind, watching the trajectories, hearing the babble of voices, knowing what dangers loom. Because they don’t know their way around Africa, Asia or America as well as they do about the local fauna, the ornithologists there usually work together with local partners. “They know their animals better than we do. And the more you know, the more you realize how complex animal behavior is.” And that people still have a lot to learn.
But not every bird just goes along with it. In the Andes they wanted to catch hummingbirds to ring them for singing observations. Patagona gigas, “Fascinating little animals.” Hummingbirds are Gahr’s favorite bird. But the lightning-fast fliers skilfully avoided large nets every time. “We haven’t been able to catch a single one yet,” says Gahr and laughs.
Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence
The Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence is dedicated to basic research on behavioral ecology, evolutionary research and neuroscience. Around 500 employees from more than 50 nations are investigating how animal creatures acquire knowledge about their environment, how they store, use and pass it on in order to solve complex problems and adapt to a constantly changing environment – not only the human an intelligent being. The institute is a merger of the two Max Planck Institutes for Neurobiology in Martinsried and for Ornithology in Seewiesen. It will not formally be completed until the beginning of 2023, both locations will remain. While field research in behavioral biology is primarily carried out in Seewiesen, in Martinsried in the south of Munich everything revolves around neurobiology, i.e. laboratory experiments that observe processes in the nerves and brain, especially in mice, zebrafish and fruit flies. There are seven directors for seven departments, together they run the institute. The managing director is currently the brain researcher Professor Tobias Bonhoeffer in Martinsried. The Martinsried site, not far from the Großhadern Clinic, will be expanded into a modern life science campus in the coming years together with the MPI for Biochemistry.
The Dawn Chorus project
In the first Corona lockdown, in spring 2020, when traffic came to a standstill and the world experienced an unusual silence, Biotopia, the planning team for the future Bavarian Natural History Museum, started the Dawn Chorus project. Interested citizens were asked to record the bird choir at dawn with their mobile phones and upload the files to their own platform. If possible, always in the same place at the same time. Thousands took part. This year, the Bavarian Bird Protection Association (LBV) joined as a project partner, there is a separate app. The aim is to use the sound recordings to document the bird diversity over the years. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen are supporting the project. People all over the world are now collecting bird calls in this way, and anyone can listen to the results, with information on place and time (https://dawn-chorus.org/). If you want to know when which bird sings in Bavaria, you will find a pretty animated bird clock on the website of the Federal Nature Conservation Agency (https://www.nabu.de/downloads/6-grafiken/vogeluhr).