Much of the work of my group on these issues has concerned wild chaffinches with fieldwork in various parts of the UK and in the Canary Isles. We have examined features such as neighbour sharing and differences in the song types that are present with distances between woods, as well as looking at the same wood some years apart to see how song has changed with time. In addition to these empirical results, we have carried out computer simulations to determine how the pattern of song sharing observed is influenced by the learning rules young birds use in choosing tutors. This combination of field observation and computer modelling has proved a valuable way of approaching the issues of how song distributions arise in the wild.
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