One rainy morning a week ago, I hear a beautiful bird song that I cannot quite identify. It’s longish, sweet and melodic. From in the bedroom, I glance over at the feeders and there’s the usual ...

Invasive parasites in the Galápagos Islands may leave some Darwin’s tree finches singing the blues. The nonnative Philornis downsi fly infests the birds’ nests and lays its eggs there. Fly larvae ...

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 ...

"I started working with these birds 25 years ago," says Jeffrey Podos, professor of biology at UMass Amherst and the paper's senior author. " In my very first publication on the finches, back in 2001, ...

The songs of 102 male House Finches (Carpodacus mexicanus) were sampled in southern California. Additionally, songs were induced with testosterone in 10 captive females. Females sang only 1 or 2 ...

Okinawa, Japan -- Like humans learning to speak, juvenile birds learn to sing by mimicking vocalizations of adults of the same species during development. Juvenile birds preferentially learn the song ...

Researchers have shown how the Bengalese finch, a domesticated songbird, can learn to tweak its song in specific ways depending on context, which could shed light on how the human brain learns to ...

A familiar bird arrives at the feeder, a little smaller than a sparrow, lighter and more nimble. It is a discrete maternal color, a streaky mix of pale and brownish-gray, well-suited to sit upon an ...

The beaks of Darwin's medium ground finches can evolve to crush the shells of hard seeds. Credit: Andrew Hendry They say that hindsight is 20/20, and though the theory of ecological speciation—which ...