Males respond to song playbacks. Cowbirds in the secondary contact zone are hard to find and hard to catch. Sample sizes are too low to conduct a true transect. Dialects and Species Recognition Receiver systems in different species can be so far diverged that inferences about the process of divergence cannot be drawn. But Dialects provide an opportunity to study the process of divergence in receiver systems within a species.
Dialect boundaries are narrow.
It has been argued that dialects represent incipient species. Bronzed Cowbirds 1. Comparative Study 3. These dialects cover large geographic ranges. Variation within dialects is low and across dialects is high.