Vocal development and patterns of vocal variation inform conservation of a critically endangered macaw

Reintroductions are increasingly used as a tool to bolster declining populations of birds, but the potential for communication barriers arising from learned vocal variation between introduced and wild populations has rarely been considered. The critically endangered great green macaw, Ara ambiguus, is one such declining species, but it is currently unknown whether there is vocal variation in adult contact calls among geographically isolated populations. Furthermore, variation in nestling calls among populations has never been investigated and could offer insight into how the nestling social environment shapes the formation of dialects. We investigated whether adult and nestling great green macaws show among-population variation in the acoustic structure of their calls by recording vocalizations in one wild, one captive, and one reintroduced population in Costa Rica. We assessed acoustic similarity among the three populations by measuring 26 parameters from the spectrogram of each call a..., , # Vocal development and patterns of vocal variation inform conservation of a critically endangered macaw Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.z8w9ghxrb](10.5061/dryad.z8w9ghxrb) ## Description of the data and file structure We made audio recordings of adult and nestling Great Green Macaws in Costa Rica, in 2023 and 2024. We recorded adults using a handheld recording rig and we recorded nestlings using autonomous recording units (ARUs). Audio data (adult and nestling calls) were used to test for vocal variation among three geographically isolated populations in Costa Rica. We also characterized vocal development for nestlings. ### Files and variables #### File: All_adult_GGM_selections.zip **Description:**Â This zip folder contains text files for all the adult calls selected in RavenPro software. Each text file is a different track and includes the exact selection time and frequency dimensions. Text files are inputs for the \"2024_GGM_adult_recording_analysis_final_revised\" R script. #### Fi..., ,