Plate Nº 63 · recorded October 10, 2026
Biology & EvolutionReported finding
Two Birds Shatter 120 Decibels — Louder Than a Chainsaw
Bare-throated bellbirds and red-legged seriemas exceed 120 decibels, a 123-species study finds. Body size and beak width explain part of the puzzle — but not why birds evolved such volume.
By James Calloway4 min read818 words
In brief
- Bare-throated bellbirds and red-legged seriemas produce calls exceeding 120 peak decibels, louder than chainsaws and jackhammers.
- The study, published in Evolution, measured 123 bird species across Massachusetts and Brazil; 113 had never had their volume cataloged.
- Bird call volumes span a 58-decibel range, from hummingbirds at about 64 decibels to over 120 decibels.
- In 2019, Jeff Podos found the white bellbird had the world's loudest bird call, later confirmed by Guinness World Records.
- Loud birds tend to be bigger, with bulky muscles and wider beak openings, but ecological explanations remain unconfirmed.
Two birds — the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema — produce calls exceeding 120 peak decibels, louder than chainsaws and jackhammers, according to a new study published in the journal Evolution. The research also begins to explain why some birds are so much louder than others: bigger bodies and wider beaks.
Biologist Jeff Podos of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his former graduate student João C.T. Menezes identified the two record contenders while measuring the volume of 123 bird species around Amherst, Massachusetts, and across Brazil. This is not Podos's first brush with avian noise records. In 2019, he showed that the Amazon's white bellbird had the world's loudest bird call — louder than standing next to a revving chainsaw — a claim Guinness World Records later confirmed.
But setting records was never the point.
What did the researchers actually want to know?
Podos and Menezes have spent their careers studying how evolutionary biology shapes the way birds communicate. For this study, they asked two questions:
- Can physical traits of a bird's body predict how loud its call will be?
- Is loudness related to a bird's ecological niche — its habitat and lifestyle — and its social organization, such as mating habits?
Answering those questions required something surprisingly rare: reliable measurements of how loud birds actually are in the wild.
Why was measuring bird volume so hard?
"Figuring out how loud a bird call is should be pretty easy in the lab," says Menezes, who completed the research as part of his graduate work at UMass Amherst. "But until very recently, it has been very challenging to do in the field, and there's very little data to draw on."
The problem is that volume — technically, amplitude — depends on distance. A scream that is ear-splitting up close may barely register a few hundred meters away. One solution would be to capture birds and run controlled experiments in a laboratory, but that is not practical, especially when working internationally and comparing large numbers of species.
"You have to get your boots on the ground," says Podos, who accompanied Menezes on the fieldwork. The pair measured amplitudes of 123 species, 113 of which had never had their volume cataloged before.
They could only do it because of recent technology. Ornithologists long lacked a practical way to measure amplitude and distance at the same time. That changed when golfers popularized accurate laser rangefinders and workplace safety monitors spurred the development of high-resolution portable sound meters. Menezes and Podos were early adopters of both tools.
"We've been able to vastly increase the number of species for which there is amplitude data," says Podos. "This is basic, foundational research that no one else has managed to do on this scale, and it points to all sorts of other questions that would be fun to follow up."
What explains the loudest calls?
The data revealed a 58-decibel range in bird call volume. At the quiet end, hummingbirds call at about 64 decibels — roughly the volume of a normal conversation. At the extreme end, bare-throated bellbirds and red-legged seriemas exceed 120 peak decibels.
The anatomy findings lined up with expectations. The loudest birds tend to be bigger, with bulky muscles that may allow greater air compression for explosive volume — a useful analogy is how a powerful breath produces a shout. They also have wider beak openings, which amplify sound much the way the wide bell of a trumpet boosts its volume.
Why are some birds so loud? The answer is still open
The ecological side of the story did not pan out. The researchers had hypothesized that the loudest birds would be:
- weaker flyers, with volume compensating for limited mobility;
- dwellers of dense forests, where seeing other birds is difficult;
- polygamous, since a mating call that travels farther might attract more mates.
The data supported none of these predictions clearly.
"We now know some of the hows," says Menezes. "Bigger bodies and wider beaks, but we've yet to discover the whys, and we probably need much more data from many more species to be able to tease out what's going on on the ecological and evolutionary front."
That prospect suits Podos just fine. He is eager to return to the field with Menezes, his golf rangefinder and his sound meter.
"Yogi Berra said, 'You can observe a lot by watching,' and the world has some beautiful things to see," says Podos. "You can't do this kind of work in the lab, or by scraping data from the internet. You have to get out into the world, you have to pay careful attention to what you're seeing and hearing, and anything you do in the field that forces you to observe more carefully is really fun — it takes you back to the roots of why we do science in the first place."
via Phys.org Biology (Source)
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Staff writer covering marketplaces and e-commerce at SciBeat.
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