Risks to unique dialects of birdsong

The study, "Risks to Unique Dialects of Birdsong: The Case of Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) Song Dialects in Southern and Eastern Ukraine During the Russia–Ukraine War," was carried out by Eugenia Yablonovska-Grishchenko and Vitaly Grishchenko in Biosphere: A Scientific Journal.

A new study from Ukraine has used satellite imagery to assess the wartime destruction of forests that host distinct regional song dialects of the Common Chaffinch, finding that while most study sites remain intact, nearly a third have been damaged or destroyed by combat, and that the type of forest determines how much is lost when the fighting reaches it.

Birds Learn Their Songs. War Can Silence Them Permanently.

Unlike the calls that birds produce instinctively from birth, the songs of many songbird species are learnt behaviours, passed down from one generation to the next through listening and imitation. Over time, local populations develop their own recognisable variants of a species' song, differing in structure, syllable sequence, or rhythm from those of birds in other regions. These are dialects in a meaningful sense of the word, not just convenient metaphors, and they represent a form of non-hereditary cultural transmission that has evolved independently in birds just as it has in human language. The Common Chaffinch is one of the best-studied examples of this phenomenon in Europe. Populations across its range maintain distinct, geographically bounded song dialects, and the steppe zone of southern and eastern Ukraine is home to several such regional vocal complexes that have been documented and mapped in previous scientific work. Since February 2022, active combat across this region has destroyed forests, triggered large-scale fires, and displaced wildlife populations. The question this study asks is a sobering one: are the forests that carry these dialects still standing, and what is the risk that the songs sung within them will disappear before they can be heard, recorded, or passed on again?

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What Satellite Images of 41 Forest Plots Revealed

Working from previously published data on the geographic distribution of chaffinch song dialects in Ukraine's steppe zone, the research team identified 41 forest plots that had been used to describe and map these regional vocal complexes. Each plot was assessed using satellite images from summer and autumn 2025 and classified into one of three conditions: normal, damaged, or destroyed. The results showed that 70.7% of plots remained in normal condition, 19.5% had been damaged by proximity to combat activity, and 9.8% had been completely destroyed following the most intense fighting. The geographic pattern of damage was not uniform. Plots located on the Donetsk Ridge, which is covered primarily by native deciduous forests of oak, ash, and other broadleaf species, showed comparatively lower rates of destruction. Deciduous forests are considerably more resistant to fire than coniferous ones, retaining more moisture and not carrying fire as readily through their canopies. By contrast, the artificial coniferous plantations of the Lower Dnipro floodplain, which were established decades ago to stabilise sandy soils, proved highly vulnerable. In plots within this zone where combat or associated fires occurred, destruction was severe or complete.

A Cultural Loss That Cannot Be Undone by Replanting

The study draws a distinction that matters enormously for conservation: losing a forest is not the same as losing a dialect, but the two losses are closely linked. Chaffinch song dialects persist because birds living within a defined geographic area learn their local song variant from older birds around them. If the forest is destroyed and the local population is wiped out or scattered, the dialect dies with them. Replanting the forest decades later does not restore the dialect, because there are no local teachers left to transmit it. In this sense, the destruction documented in this study is not simply ecological damage but cultural damage in a biological sense, the erasure of learnt, transmitted behaviours that took generations to develop and that cannot be recovered once broken. The authors note that the sub-dialect of the Donetsk Ridge faces lower extinction risk due to the relative resilience of its deciduous forest habitat, while the Lower Dnipro floodplain dialect faces a substantially higher risk given how severely its coniferous forests have burned. The study is limited by the resolution of available satellite imagery and by the impossibility of conducting fieldwork in active combat zones, meaning the ground-level state of individual sites could not be directly verified. The authors call for post-war field surveys to assess which populations and dialects have survived, and for the documentation and recording of remaining dialects to be treated as a conservation priority before further losses occur. The research was led by corresponding author Dr. Eugenia Yablonovska-Grishchenko, alongside co-author Vitaly Grishchenko.

Read the published article here: https://bit.ly/4jzX38K

Article title: Risks to Unique Dialects of Birdsong: The Case of Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) Song Dialects in Southern and Eastern Ukraine During the Russia–Ukraine War

DOI: 10.2174/0129501830480608260902063738

Biosphere: A Scientific Journal