Abstract
Abstract Geographic variation in bird song that is described as local song dialects refers to a mosaic pattern of distribution of songs in a population within the dispersal capacities of the species. Corn buntings (Miliaria calandra) in the region of Alentejo, Portugal, show such local dialects. However, an interesting aspect of this population is that song types are restricted to sub - groups of males within each dialect rather than all males singing all song types as in other populations. After describing the pattern of song type variation qualitatively (i.e. classifying spectrograms by eye), we used cross - correlation of spectrograms in quantitative comparisons. This confirmed the qualitative classification of songs into song type categories and showed a tendency for neighbouring males to have most similar songs. Males did not respond significantly more or less strongly to playback of different song types; however males clearly discriminated between different song types in a habituation paradigm.
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