Mike Webber coauthored a 1978 experimental study with John Krebs and Ruth Ashcroft on birdsong and territory defence in the great tit. The paper compared aspects of song repertoires as signals used in maintaining territories.[ref]
Song repertoires and territory defence in the great tit by John Krebs and others. Primary byline and Abstract; repertoire experiments
A central design feature was playback: a loudspeaker can reproduce an acoustic cue while separating it from the presence of a resident animal. This makes a sound signal experimentally manipulable. A difference in settlement after playback is evidence about the signal's effect in the tested situation; it does not by itself show how an arriving bird internally represents the singer. The contribution verified here is the joint experiment rather than a separately documented division of labour among its authors.
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