Sarus cranes typically live most of their lives as a male-female duo, singing tightly coordinated duets. At a glance, the male and female, both standing 1.5-1.8 meters (5-6 feet) tall, are difficult to tell apart visually. They’re both gray-bodied with red necks and head. But researchers have found a way of distinguishing between the sexes […]

Sarus cranes typically live most of their lives as a male-female duo, singing tightly coordinated duets. At a glance, the male and female, both standing 1.5-1.8 meters (5-6 feet) tall, are difficult to tell apart visually. They’re both gray-bodied with red necks and head. But researchers have found a way of distinguishing between the sexes through the notes they sing in their songs, reports Mongabay India’s Kartik Chandramouli. Being able to accurately tell between a male and a female of a species, such as the sarus crane (Antigone antigone), a species considered vulnerable to extinction, is crucial for understanding several aspects of its life: from the sex ratio of its populations and the sex-specific roles the individuals play in the wild, to how human activities influence the two sexes, all of which can ultimately help inform conservation actions. So, for more than six months, researcher Suhridham Roy spent his time in agricultural fields in the Indian states of Gujarat, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, observing and recording 215 duets from 136 breeding bird pairs of sarus cranes. Roy and his colleagues analyzed the recorded duets as graphs called spectrograms. Each duet consists of an introduction, trill and the main section. The analysis, published in a recent study, showed that the male and female portions within each section — cross-referenced with careful field observations — varied significantly and had distinct acoustic signatures. Male notes tended to be longer, lower-pitched, with wider modulation. Female notes were brief, higher-pitched, and sharper. “Identifying sex is…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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