Nov. 30, 2005 — The sexy sounds emitted by male pigeons send female pigeons into the bird version of rapture, and such vocalizations seem to affect the females more than when they watched a desirous male strut his stuff, a recent study determined.

Since the males usually vocalize and strut at the same time, the findings suggest the strutting may be "redundant," meaning that it serves the same function as the sounds to hammer home a point, which in this case is that the male wants to mate.

Humans communicate using comparable signals, such as when a person might raise his or her eyebrows while at the same time asking someone, "Care to dance?" The eyebrow move alone might be misunderstood or ignored, but together the facial expression and words suggest what the speaker is thinking.

A male pigeon "voice" alone seems to be a big turn on for female pigeons.

"The acoustic signals were very salient to the birds: when the females could hear but not see the males, they responded with some courtship behavior (circle walking and spreading their tails), but most importantly they began to coo," said lead author Sarah Partan, whose research was outlined in a recent issue of the journal Animal Behavior.

Partan, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, explained to Animal Planet News that cooing is important because it stimulates ovulation in females.

Humans do not seem to respond to sounds in such a dramatic way, but Partan did say that smells, such as pheromonal cues, do impact human female cycling, such as when a group of closely associated females all start to menstruate at the same time.

Partan and her colleagues studied how six female white Carneaux pigeons reacted to the sounds and visuals of a male that was recorded using audio-visual equipment while he looked at a female pigeon that was placed in a cage next to his.

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