DOI: 10.5061/dryad.jm63xsj75
title: Data from: Singing behaviour of Ruby-crowned Kinglets (Regulus calendula) in relation to time-of-day, time-of-year, and social context

description: Observational field studies provide insight on the multifunctional nature
 of birdsong. For example, if song production were limited to
 pre-fertilization, then that would suggest a mate attraction function. If
 it were used throughout the breeding season and in response to intruding
 males, then that would suggest a territorial defence function. In the
 present study, we determined the daily and seasonal singing patterns of
 male Ruby-crowned Kinglets (Regulus calendula) in Labrador, Canada, using
 microphone arrays in two breeding seasons. Using a playback experiment, we
 simulated a territorial intrusion to compare the structure of songs
 produced while defending a territory to the structure of songs produced
 during solo and contest singing. Singing peaked in the early part of the
 breeding season and then declined continuously for the remainder of the
 season, which suggests that the songs function in mate attraction. Singing
 peaked 2-3 h after dawn, and then declined steadily until it stopped at
 2200 h. Some nocturnal singing was observed, but no dawn singing was
 observed. A high probability of signal overlap by heterospecific songs at
 dawn would hinder signal recognition and explain the observed delay in
 peak singing activity. Vocal responses to playback suggested a function in
 territory defence. However, there were no significant differences in the
 duty cycle, frequency modulation, and bandwidth of songs in relation to
 the context of song production, though songs were shorter in the intrusion
 context than during solo singing. Overall, the study provides the first
 quantitative description of the effects of time of day, time of year, and
 social context on singing behaviour in this understudied species.
description: Songs from the solo singing and counter-singing contexts were
 derived from the annotated songs from microphone array recordings. A song
 was considered 'solo' if it was not preceded or followed by the
 song of another male for 10 s (as determined by the time stamps of all
 annotated songs, not just those meeting the inclusion criteria), and
 'countersinging' if it was. A song was considered
 'intrusion' if it was produced by a focal male during the 5-min
 playback period or within one minute after the end of the playback period.
 We retained songs that were not masked by the playback for the ‘intrusion’
 context. For ‘contest’ and ‘solo’ contexts, we retained only high-quality
 songs for our structural analysis, which included songs with no distortion
 or overlapping sounds, and that were produced within 15 m from an array
 microphone (as determined by the localization process). 
 We measured the acoustic structure of each song using Luscinia
 software (http://rflachlan.github.io/Luscinia/). Each song was viewed as a
 spectrogram (512-point fast Fourier transform, Hamming window, 88%
 overlap, 28 dB dynamic range, 100% dynamic compression), and the automatic
 signal detection algorithm was used to identify the elements composing the
 song and the silent intervals between them. We measured the following four
 structural features from each song: Song
 duration: the length of time between the beginning of the first element of
 the song and the end of the last, including the silent intervals between
 each element. The end of a song was determined when there were no elements
 produced within 4 seconds after the last element.
 Duty cycle: the sum of the durations of each element divided by
 song duration. Frequency modulation: the frequency of
 maximum amplitude (i.e. peak frequency) was determined for each spectrum
 within each element of the song. The cumulative absolute change in peak
 frequency from one spectrum to the next was then divided by the cumulative
 duration of all signal elements within the song to yield a rate of peak
 frequency change (Hz/s). Bandwidth: the difference
 between the 95<sup>th</sup> percentile and
 5<sup>th</sup> percentile of all peak frequency values in a
 song.
description: 'element level data v02.csv' - contains the duration of
 each single element (i.e. a continuous note) in each song <br>
 'song level data v02.csv' - contains information about the
 number of elements comprising a song as well as the duration of each
 song.<br> 'peak frequency data v02.csv' - contains peak
 frequency measurements for the time bins compriseing each element in a
 song.<br> 'summary stats from models.csv' - contains the
 mean and standard error of the song structure variables derived from the
 models run in the R script. <strong>Fahmy Wilson
 RCKI song structure analysis R script:</strong><br> This
 script calculates several structural variables from raw data created by
 Luscinia software (http://rflachlan.github.io/Luscinia/) and runs mixed
 effects models to determine the relation of the song structure variables
 to social context.<br> <strong>line 67</strong> - used
 to relevel the treatments (i.e. social context) to obtain the mean and st
 error of the response variable from each model using the summary()
 function on the model result (e.g. line 73) and then document the mean and
 standard error of the intercept in an excel spreadsheat to create
 'summary stats from models.csv', which is used to generate
 Figure 4. To relevel the dataframe,  change the 'ref =' to the
 different contexts (solo, context, intrusion) and rerun the
 models.