Birds in towns eschew many of the traditional, more melodious songs to blast out new tunes with staccato notes at a higher pitch to proclaim their macho qualities. The study of great tits reveals that not only are they more raucous than their country cousins but will experiment with new sounds and arrangements.

As successful town-dwellers, they have learnt, the study suggests, that increasing the pitch of their song to counter the background noise of cars and machinery boosts their chances of attracting a mate.

Shorter, sharper calls are also more likely to be heard by territorial rivals before they can come face to face and end up fighting a bloody turf war.

Researchers listened to the calls of great tits, Parus major, above right, in ten European cities, including London, and found that they had all adopted new types of song. Mating and territorial calls of the male birds living in the urban jungle showed a trend towards innovative note combinations, higher pitch and shortened notes.

By contrast, great tits in forests and woodland close to each of the cities preferred an orthodox warble at a more relaxed pace. While forest birds stuck to the usual combinations of two, three and four-note tunes, the urbanised tits experimented with one and five-note calls. Even when five-note tunes were used, the duration was shorter than the traditional varieties because the first note was cut short.

One great tit in Rotterdam broke the trend towards shorter arrangements when it attempted a 16-note song, probably copied from a blue tit, but sang it at breakneck speed.

Previous studies have shown that some species of bird sing louder in specific locations but this is the first to establish a pan-European pattern and to record the faster pace and curtailed notes.

In their report, published in the journal Current Biology, the research team from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands said: “Our data show that the adjustment of individual great tits to local noise conditions is not a local phenomenon but occurs throughout Europe and probably in all noisy urban areas.”

They said that the most likely cause of the change was to overcome the noise of trains, aircraft and road traffic.

So different are the calls of the urban and country birds that the researchers suggested that the birds may eventually split into two species.

This had implications for conservation programmes. “The behavioural flexibility and the apparent room for spectral variation may make great tits urban survivors,” they said.

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