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Long-term stability in the vocal duets of the endangered Siberian Crane Leucogeranus leucogeranus

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Abstract

Vocal-based monitoring is increasingly being used as a non-invasive method for identifying individuals within avian populations and is promising for the Siberian Crane, Leucogeranus leucogeranus. This is a poorly studied, long-lived, secretive and critically endangered bird species that breeds in the Arctic tundra of western and eastern regions of Siberia. We assessed between- and within-year stability of individual-specific vocal features in duets of Siberian Crane and tested the effect of pair-mate change on their stability. Previous findings showed that duets are specific to different pairs of birds; however, it is still unknown how long pair-specific traits of duets remain and if they change in the course of a year or when birds re-mate. We recorded duets of 15 reproductively active pairs in the Oka Crane Breeding Centre in 2003–2006 and 2013–2017. We found that pair-specific vocal signatures remained stable both within the year and across ~ 10 years. After a change of mate, most of the variables we measured in the call did not change in any of the birds. Our data suggest that the stability of the individually specific vocal features may enable Siberian Cranes to be reliably identified by their duets over the birds’ lifetime. We believe that our work can increase confidence in the use of acoustic recognition techniques for endangered crane monitoring programs. Our results also suggest that Siberian Cranes may use their duets to form long-term social bonds between neighbours.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the staff of the Crane Breeding Centre of Oka Biosphere State Nature Reserve: Galina Nosachenko, Kirill Postelnykh, Tatiana Postelnykh, Elina Antonyuk and others for making the research possible and for the all-round help during data gathering. We thank Oxana Lukyanchuk for help with cataloguing duet recordings and Eugenia Bragina for manuscript reading and discussion. During our work, we adhered to the ‘Guidelines for the treatment of animals in behavioural research and teaching’ (Rollin and Kessel 1998) and to the laws of the Russian Federation. This study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (Grant 06-04-48400).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Vorobievy Gory 1/12, Moscow, Russia, 119234

    Anna V. Klenova

  2. Laboratory of Gene Engineering, National Research Center for Hematology, Novy Zykovsky pr. 4a, Moscow, Russia, 125167

    Maria V. Goncharova

  3. Oka Biosphere State Nature Reserve, Oka Crane Breeding Centre, Brykin Bor, Lakash district, Ryazan Region, Russia, 391072

    Tatiana A. Kashentseva

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  1. Anna V. Klenova
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Correspondence to Anna V. Klenova.

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Data collection protocol #2003–2014 was approved by the Committee of Bioethics of Lomonosov Moscow State University.

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Supplementary file1 Online Resource 1a (Figure). Discriminant analysis on the 11 acoustic variables of the Siberian Crane (Leucogeranus leucogeranus) duets. The duets of ten pairs are represented according to the three main functions of the analysis in the first study period. Each pair is represented by one color and each point corresponds to one analysed duet (WMV 2149 kb)

Supplementary file2 Online Resource 1b (Figure). Discriminant analysis on the 11 acoustic variables of the Siberian Crane (Leucogeranus leucogeranus) duets. The duets of ten pairs are represented according to the three main functions of the analysis in the second study period. Each pair is represented by one color and each point corresponds to one analysed duet (WMV 2602 kb)

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Klenova, A.V., Goncharova, M.V. & Kashentseva, T.A. Long-term stability in the vocal duets of the endangered Siberian Crane Leucogeranus leucogeranus. Polar Biol 43, 813–823 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-020-02689-0

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