Section: New Results

Without eye contact, birds are Markovian!

Any social birds rely on acoustic messages to organize their daily activity (such as parenting and food foraging). In many occasions, birds are within earshot but not in visual contact and therefore should rely only on acoustic channel for this communication. In collaboration with the University of Saint-Etienne, we developed automatic extraction scripts that can detect birds vocalizations in a protocol of meeting with decreasing distance and with or without visual contact modality. Our worked showed that without visual contact birds are more synchronized and their vocal dynamics cannot be distinguished from a two state Markov chain. This markov property vanishes as soon as visual contact is restablished. This work has been published in the main ethology journal: Animal Behaviour[23] .