Cheetah Chirps and Gibbon Duets
Posted at 2:36 pm August 22, 2006 by Sagan Friant
From across the Wild Animal Park I can hear birds chirping, elephants trumpeting, and construction work grinding. My time as an intern for CRES has opened my perspectives and tuned my ears. I have begun to listen and appreciate the auditory elements of the Park. As visitors, we get so excited to see all these exotic animals that we often disregard the fact that hearing them can also be a unique experience. This summer I am listening to and recording the vocalizations of cheetahs and gibbons (pictured) at the Wild Animal Park.
I’ve written previously about recording cheetah vocalizations and categorizing them to develop a “Cheetah Dictionary” (see Sagan’s previous blog, Cheetah Dictionary). I am working on this project so that we can better understand their communication and interpret when they are ready to breed. By visiting the cheetahs in the morning and watching archived videos from previous researchers I have been able to record many different vocalizations: chirps, whines, growls, and stutters. We are especially interested in the unique stutter vocalization because it is believed to relate to sexual behavior. Since the male and female cheetahs live solitary lives, the stutter may be a useful indicator of captive breeding prospects.
You don’t need to be an acoustic enthusiast to appreciate the vocalizations that gibbons make: they can be heard from all over the Park! Gabriella’s crested gibbons are small apes from Asia that sing duets in the early morning. I have been recording their singing bouts, which last up to 30 minutes. The male and female have distinct phrases that they sing to each other. It is believed that this unique singing behavior functions to protect their territory and strengthen their bond. Gibbons are monogamous, which is rare in primates. The length and complexity of their duet is reflective of how long a male and female have been together. By understanding gibbon duets we can begin to comprehend the quality of their pair bond and the factors that contribute to their happiness. Ultimately, we hope this will help to increase captive breeding success. More about gibbon singing will appear in a future ZOONOOZ article.
Communication is a very important part of animal behavior and understanding it can be extremely useful for conservation efforts. On your next visit to the Zoo or Wild Animal Park open your ears and enjoy a whole new experience!
Sagan Friant is a Summer Fellow with the Behavioral Biology Division of CRES.
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August 23rd, 2006 at 9:17 am
Sagan, thanks so much for the really interesting information about cheetah vocalizations. Somehow I had missed your earlier blog on this subject and appreciated having the link to it. And I do love listening to the gibbons vocalizing. I get to the zoo far more frequently than to the park, and often hear them as I walk through the Sun Bear Forest. And their cousins, the siamangs, also put on a wonderful musical show most mornings.
Everything you and your fellow researchers learn about all these wonderful and endangered species is so important!
August 30th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
I wish I could have heard that.
Just before I left on vacation I was treated to a pair of warblers that had set up shop for the moment in trees in the parking lot of my office (Overland Park and Kansas City are very much open woodland cities, they leave trees here, and I live in a woodland that hasn’t been disturbed since about 1912 except for trees that die…). They were probably males and exchanging challenges. I wish I could see better or had a pair of field glasses on me, the birds were less than 4″ and appeared to have a light throat patch but for the rest of ID I’m lost. They stuck to the shade of the leaves. It left me listening for a bit and trying to see them, too.
But the fact that they were exchanging a recognizable pattern song with a bit of variation for each bird was fascinating.
Keep up the good work.