Male zebra finches learn their song by imitating conspecifics. To stand out in the crowd, each male develops its own unique song. Because of this individual-specific song, it was long assumed that ...

Countless YouTube videos feature pet birds singing and talking to their owners. Although it may seem like simple mimicry, ...

The ability to learn new motor skills is critical to almost all aspects of our lives. From the time a baby is born, it learns to move its arms and hands, to pronounce words and to walk. Such skills ...

When we hear a song for the first time, it often seems like it goes in one ear and out the other, sometimes only few catchy words from a chorus leaving much of an impression. But when the Australian ...

The songs of zebra finches, long used as a model for how humans learn to use speech, get a little sloppy after a few drinks, a new study finds.... Scientists Discover That Drunk Birds Sing Like Drunks ...

Not all birds sing, but those that do — some several thousand species — do it a lot. All over the world, as soon as light filters over the horizon, songbirds launch their serenades. They sing to ...

Australian zebra finches sing a rhythmic high-pitched song while incubating their eggs in a hot environment, which researchers have named a “heat call”. Experiments now show that this call influences ...

They say that hindsight is 20/20, and though the theory of ecological speciation—which holds that new species emerge in response to ecological changes—seems to hold in retrospect, it has been ...

Complex learning processes like speaking or singing follow similar patterns. Using the example of zebra finches, researchers have investigated how young birds imitate the courtship songs of their ...