Imagine having a different accent from someone else simply because your house was farther up the same hill. For at least one species of songbird, that appears to be the case. Researchers have found that the mating songs of male mountain chickadees (Poecile gambeli, shown) differ in their duration, loudness, and the frequency ranges of individual chirps, depending in part on the elevation of their habitat in the Sierra Nevada mountains of the western United States. The songs also differed from those at similar elevations on a nearby peak. Young males of this species learn their breeding songs by listening to adult males during their first year of life, the researchers note. And because these birds don’t migrate as the seasons change, and young birds don’t settle far from where they grew up, it’s likely that the differences persist in each local group—the ornithological equivalent of having Southern drawls and Boston accents. Females may use the differences in dialect to distinguish local males from outsiders that may not be as well adapted to the neighborhood they’re trying to invade, the team reports today in Royal Society Open Science.