Spectrograms of call elements. (a) Natural aerial alarm calls from species in three passerine families, including the Maluridae: superb fairy-wren (sufw), white-winged fairy-wren (wwfw), variegated fairy-wren (vafw); Acanthizidae: southern whiteface (stwf), chestnut-rumped thornbill (crtb), brown gerygone (bnge), white-browed scrubwren (wbsw); and Meliphagidae: New Holland honeyeater (nhhe). (b) Synthetic calls used in experiments 2 (4.1 and 11.1 kHz only), 3, 4 and 5. The mean peak frequency (PF, kHz) and mean frequency modulation rate (MR, Hz) is shown next to the natural call of each species [19]. The beginning of each element is aligned with the frequency modulation rate. Some elements are lighter in shade to distinguish calls that overlap. Spectrograms were produced in Raven Pro 1.3 [43] and set to Blackman window function, a temporal grid resolution of 0.295 ms with 94.9% overlap and a frequency grid resolution of 86.1 Hz.