Does bidies have good hearings?

Question

does birdies have good hearing?

Answer 1

Birds have good ears but they tend to hear things differently to us. Within sounds birds recognise and remember something akin to absolute pitch whereas humans perceive sounds via relative pitch. Very few humans can hear and remember absolute pitch. Relative pitch however allows us to hear a tune in one octave and still recognise the tune in a different octave. Birds cannot do this. Birds do however recognise 'timbre' (a fundamental note combined with harmonies). Recognising timbre and harmonic variations gives birds great versatility in the sounds that they can respond to, and in some cases reproduce. Birds also hear shorter notes than we can. Humans process sounds in bytes about 1/20 of a second long whereas birds discriminate up to 1/200 of a second. This means where we hear one sound only, a bird may hear as many as ten separate notes. Some birds such as Pigeons can hear much lower sounds than us. Birds (Pigeons) can be music buffs and can distinguish between human composers such as Bach and Stravinsky.

The range of hearing in many species of birds is comparable with that of mankind. Having a greatest sensitivity between 2000 and 4000 hertz (cycles per second). This is partly why bird song is so useful in bird identification - it is easy for us to hear - and partly why we find bird song so pleasant. In birds as a whole, the known hearing ranges vary from a lower limit of below 100 hertz to over 29000, though not all birds have this range. The common Mallard (a**s platyrhynchus) for instance has a range from 300 hz to 8000 hz.

Some birds have hearing much more sensitive than ours. Owls not only are more sensitive to small sounds but have asymmetrical ears (one ear being lower on the skull than the other) this means sounds from a single source reach the ears at slightly different times. This gives the owl the equivalent of binocular hearing, allowing them to pinpoint the source of a sound extremely accurately. Barn Owls, Tyto alba, can locate and catch small mammals in complete darkness using only their hearing. Finally, a number of species of owls have tufts of feathers which look like ears and give rise to names like 'Long Eared Owl' and 'Short Eared Owl'. These 'ears' are not ears at all, however, and have nothing to do with hearing.

Birds lack the externally visible part of the ear that we think of as an animal's ear and which is strictly speaking called the pinna. The ear of a bird has three chambers much like ours. The outer ear is simply a tube leading to the tympanum or ear drum. Behind this is the middle ear which has a single bone stretched across it called the columella. This is where, in mammals, you have an arrangement of three bones (Hammer, Anvil and Stirrup/Stypes). The inner ear is bathed in fluid, the outer and middle ears being air filled. It consists of five parts, of which two, the semicircular canals (see above) and the utricle are concerned with balance. The other three are the cochlea, the lagena and the sacculus. The lagena is used to help detect low frequency sounds, the sacculus to help detect high frequency sounds and the cochlea contains special sensory hears which change the physical vibrations caused by the sound waves into electrical impulses to be passed along to the brain.