Our findings confirmed that most between-individual variation was in the number of notes and note sequence duration while most within-individual variation resulted from the percent of downstrokes. User error rates (proportion of the Linear Discriminant Analysis classifications that were incorrect) were low for Types A and B, and somewhat higher for Type C, while producer error rates (proportion of the song type for which the Linear Discriminant Analysis was incorrect) were somewhat higher for Types A and C than the minimal levels achieved for Type B. Linear Discriminant Analysis and Random Forest methods were used to verify the assignments and showed strong agreement for Type A with slightly less agreement on Types B and C.
Visual and auditory assessment of the introductory note sequence of each song identified three distinct song types (A, B, and C) and most of the songs were assigned to one of these types. Here, we analyzed song pattern variations of 651 Louisiana Waterthrush singers in audio spectrogram recordings obtained from our field work and publicly accessible bioacoustics archives. Louisiana Waterthrush (Parkesia motacilla) is a familiar singer in the Western Hemisphere family Parulidae, yet apparent geographic variations in its song and potentially related causal mechanisms have not received detailed examination in previously published studies.