"It's still not obvious to us where that would have been, because the two species prefer such different habitats. "We knew Mom was there, she was the one who laid the egg and sat on the nest," Toews said. Their vocalizations can reveal how and by whom they were raised. For the most part, songbirds learn to sing from their fathers. Their methodology relied on analyzing both nature and nurture. The combination of audio and genetic material would get them as close as they could to solving the mystery of the bird's genesis. From the blood sample, they could obtain a small sample of DNA. Luckily, Toews had a host of techniques available for solving just this type of mystery. Yet, his origin story was largely a mystery. The researchers determined that the bird Gosser spotted was the healthy, 1-year-old male offspring of a rose-breasted grosbeak and scarlet tanager, the first-ever documented hybrid of its kind. Toews explained that the two species have such divergent nesting preferences that they have been on independent evolutionary trajectories for at least 10 million years - until now. Tanagers typically prefer the canopy cover of mature forests while rose-breasted grosbeaks are happy out in the open along the edges of woodlands. How and where they met remains a mystery to researchers, as the two species prefer different habitats. ![]() ![]() The story begins with a very unlikely encounter between a female rose-breasted grosbeak and a male scarlet tanager. "I love this story, because it starts with a little mystery and ends with a surprising discovery," said David Toews, lead author of the study and assistant professor of biology at Penn State. Their work was recently published in the journal Ecology and Evolution. To follow up on Gosser's tip, a team of researchers led by Penn State was able to use a combination of genomic sequencing and song analysis to identify the specimen as a rare hybrid bird, whose ancestors haven't shared the same breeding location or lineage for 10 million years. He took some photos and called for backup - a team from the National Aviary in Pittsburgh arrived soon after to catch the bird and obtain a blood sample. When Gosser finally located the songbird, he saw what appeared to be a rose-breasted grosbeak, but it sounded just like a scarlet tanager.
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