Beagle Investigations Return with Darwinian Data

This article is really nice because it connects song and beak morphology all in the realm of evolution. It's a quick read and good for beginners but also pretty interesting for anyone

Will have to look into more, but from what I've seem it's an evolution focused lab based in separating finch species. Seems to be a premade lab 

Ok so it's actually really cool! The premise is you're trying to sort finches into two groups based on song sound, spectrograms, beak shape and appearance, at the end you can check how close you were. Theres another activities for differentiating finches that's not quite as related and tabs to learn about spectrograms and  Daphne Major. Both are pretty basic crash courses but would be very helpful for a beginner or an introductory activity. I'll definitely provide a walk through because it's super fun!!

Very cool multimedia

A bit outdated, but links out to other interesting bird data sources, which include a lot of citizen science. 

The modules, "Species Concepts in Birds" and "Sound Trees" use song data. Lessons are well developed with learning objectives, instructor guides, student handouts, how-to's on the Macaulay library and RavenViewer, and some assessment ideas.

Ecology and Evolution of Darwin's Finches by Peter R. Grant

Published by Princeton University Press 1999 

Overview of useful sections:

Chapter 9

Song and Bill Morphology as Species Cues 

Song is the way of expressing ones species from over a large distance, which beak shape is how it would be expressed in the short distance 

Beyond Species-Recognition: Mate Choice 

In this section, Grant reports on 14 females he watched, after observing the songs of their fathers. Though statistically speaking 2-3 of the females should have mated with males that shared their fathers song if it were random, not a single female did. This implies that song could act as a prevention method against inbreeding to keep the gene pool healthy.

Chapter 14

Other Features

"The distribution of sound energy in songs varies in such a way that it might be transmitted best in the particular configuration of vegetation in which the song is sung." In other words, the plants in an area have a large effect on the songs of the finches that live there. 

The first article is a transition into Grants work concerning differentiation in bird songs. The article briefly discusses the allopatric divergence, and the interesting concept of song being a culturally inherited trait. Paragraph 22-4 delves into the song in relation to the hybridization of finch species due to song and how this revolves around the males. The end of paragraph 24 states "The barrier to gene exchange erected by song differences has been breached, and environmental change appears to have been the most important factor" It ends by explaining that the variety of finch songs likely has to do with both sexual selection along with a random shift in learned behavior. 

This article cited the works of Grant which are extremely relevant to the study of song and evolution however the publication is a full book and I could not track it down anywhere free so I will delve into the library when I get the chance. 

This is a fun little game created by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology that can help you familiarize yourself not only with the songs of various birds, but also with the general idea of a spectrogram. With enough practice, just looking at a spectrogram with allow you to imagine a pretty accurate song before even listening to it.