Great tit (Parus major) / Single-population wild song dataset
The Wytham Great Tit Song Dataset is an unusually dense wild-population resource: its authors report 109,963 annotated songs and 1,161,033 acoustic notes from more than 400 individual birds, collected in Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire, from 2020 to 2023. The complete current OSF API root lists 23 files totaling 12,184,678,510 bytes: 14 data files (12,184,652,639 bytes) and nine documentation files (25,871 bytes). The four song-archive parts total 11,380,411,540 bytes and ten metadata/map files total 804,241,099 bytes. The OSF node declares CC BY 4.0 and reports last modification on 2023-07-10; no explicit dataset version label was present in the inspected node response. The 2025 paper already trained a ViT metric-learning model on this corpus, generated 384-dimensional embeddings for all 109,963 songs, and used them to analyze repertoire similarity and demographic drivers of song culture. It then used automated clustering plus manual song categorization; the reported 0.87 validation accuracy belongs to a separate ResNet50 validation procedure. The dataset supports valuable song-structure and population-methods work, but it has no independently observed interaction context, receiver response or label for what a song means.
◎ Wytham Woods region, United Kingdom
Observation dates not established here
Evidence, location & limits
This is one wild population and dawn-singing research system, so its labels do not establish transfer to other sites, species, household phones or general communication. Dataset documentation says bird identity associated with a breeding attempt can be uncertain or a proxy when the bird was not caught. The ordinary shared package is not the approximately 9 TB of original continuous soundscapes used in preparation. The authors’ nestbox metadata documentation specifies location coordinates in British National Grid and says the coordinates are also included in main.csv; the OSF manifest separately lists a Wytham perimeter shapefile. We inspected these documentation descriptions only, not coordinate values or file contents. Treat those fields as potentially sensitive wildlife-location information: keep public geography coarse and exclude precise coordinates from any future derivatives unless an appropriate wildlife-location review establishes a need and safe handling. The complete 2026-10-24 API tree has 23 entries; the earlier same-day 14-entry result was a partial traversal of data/ and omitted docs/. All 23 normalized paths and byte sizes match the historical snapshot. The 2026-10-23 local manifest stored a malformed 63-character SHA-256 for docs/metadata/main.md. On October 25, the current 6,426-byte file matched the OSF API SHA-256 and MD5; the cause of the malformed historical string is unknown. The file content was not reviewed, and no other provider hash was recomputed. Annotation values, grouping keys and dataset-level splits remain unaudited. The prior ViT embeddings were calculated across all songs from the same corpus, so treating them as a held-out-individual baseline for a new Talk2Nature benchmark would be an invalid shortcut; this is an evaluation-design inference from the published training scope. The 2025 paper already covers the obvious deep-embedding, individual-similarity and demographic song-culture tasks. No independent specialist assessed this note.
Reviewed the 2024 publisher article and author dataset documentation for collection design, labels and package format; Oxford Research Archive rights record; setup-code license and pinned revision; and the full 2025 Current Biology article including STAR Methods on feature extraction, similarity, clustering and validation. The 2025 methods describe a ViT metric-learning model trained on song-type labels from this corpus, 384-dimensional embeddings calculated for all 109,963 songs, and downstream repertoire-similarity/cultural analyses; the article reports 0.87 validation accuracy for a separate ResNet50 procedure on a random subset. The reviewed method text does not establish an individual-held-out test for that validation. The complete 2026-10-24 OSF root traversal lists 23 current file entries totaling 12,184,678,510 bytes: 14 data files and nine documentation files. An earlier same-day 14-entry traversal had listed only the data/ folder and omitted the separate docs/ folder; it is superseded. All 23 normalized paths and byte sizes match the 2026-10-23 snapshot. The saved 2026-10-23 SHA-256 for docs/metadata/main.md is malformed at 63 characters. On 2026-10-25, the 6,426-byte file was retrieved solely for integrity verification; its SHA-256 and MD5 match the current OSF API. Its content was not read or redistributed. The OSF node license relationship declares CC BY 4.0. The author nestbox documentation specifies British National Grid X/Y coordinates and says these data are also included in main.csv. No coordinate values, audio/annotation or analysis-code payloads were accessed; the one documentation file was not read or redistributed; no model was run and no independent specialist reviewed this Talk2Nature note.
Mapped to a coarse Wytham Woods study-region point from the published study-site description. The dataset documents nestbox coordinates; no coordinate values or data files were inspected or plotted.
Location metadata reviewed: 2026-10-24. Map points are approximate locators, not sample coordinates.
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