Calling someone a bird-brain may not be the insult it was intended to be. Although small in size, some birds’ brains, such as ...

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 ...

After hundreds of millions of years of evolution, songbirds and humans continue to share things in common: Both learn to sing ...

We are all born completely helpless, with little of the knowledge and skills we will need to survive as adults. Even our ...

Just three more boxes. Manfred Gahr apologizes for the slight disarray. “Just these three and the move is complete,” he says. When they are unpacked, his office – the room in which renowned ...

For decades, scientists have known that only a few groups of birds—songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds—can learn to produce new sounds. But a new article in The Quarterly Review of Biology reveals ...

Juvenile birds learn the length of the sounds in a song from a false memory introduced via optogenetics, instead of from real interactions with a tutor bird. Young zebra finches that receive feedback ...

In an article published earlier this week in Nature, researchers revealed the complete genome of the zebra finch and focused on the intricacies of their vocal communication. The zebra finch, the males ...

Species must reproduce to survive, and animals have found unique ways of achieving this. For some, including us, it seems as though producing a few offspring that require extended care is the best ...

To us, bird song may just sound pretty. However, if we want to understand why birds sing, we have to consider that song may have multiple functions. A male’s song may serve to repel a male neighbor, ...