A densely sampled and richly annotated acoustic dataset from a wild bird population

Abstract

We present a high-resolution, densely-sampled dataset of wild bird songs collected over multiple years from a single population of Great Tits (Parus major) in the UK. The dataset includes over 1,100,000 individual acoustic units from 109,963 richly annotated songs, sung by more than 400 individual birds, and provides unprecedented detail on the vocal behaviour of wild birds. Here, we describe the data collection and processing procedures and provide a summary of the data. We also discuss potential research questions that can be addressed using this dataset, including behavioural repeatability and stability, links between vocal performance and reproductive success, the timing of song production, syntactic organisation of song production, and song learning in the wild. We have made the dataset and associated software tools publicly available with the aim that other researchers can benefit from this resource and use it to further our understanding of bird vocal behaviour in the wild.