Birds communicate reproductive success in song

... CORVALLIS, Ore. Some migratory songbirds figure out the best place to live by eavesdropping...therwise would have avoided. This suggests that songbirds have more complex communication abilities than had...dings are probably relevant to at least some other songbirds and perhaps other animal species as well. Much is ...

Songbirds offer clues to highly practiced motor skills in humans

...iations in highly practiced skills persist in both songbirds and humans. Now, scientists think they know why. ...continually correct for deviations. The tune of songbirds is a complex skill, produced in highly stereotyped...inards team and others has revealed that when male songbirds sing alone there is greater variability in their s...

Bird Song Study Provides Clues to Human Speech Disorders

... A recent research has found that songbirds have a distinct right-brain response to the sound of songs, and can provide... the neural and behavioral mechanisms by which humans learn to make sounds. songbirds such as zebra finches have specialized areas of their brains dedicated to c...

Males Lifespan Shortened By Elevated Levels Of Testosterone

...ntally. Over nine breeding seasons, Wendy Reed (North Dakota State University) and her colleagues followed a group of dark-eyed juncos, small mountain songbirds found throughout North America. They injected males with elevated levels of testosterone and found that they had shorter lives but that they were very...

songbirds in Biological News

Migrating songbirds learn survival tips on the fly

(Kingston, ON) Migrating songbirds take their survival cues from local winged residents when flying through unfamiliar territory, a new Queen's University-led study shows. It's a case of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," says biologist Joseph Nocera, who conducted the research while working...

Beavers: Dam good for songbirds

NEW YORK (October 8, 2008) The songbird has a friend in the beaver. According to a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the busy beaver's signature dams provide critical habitat for a variety of migratory songbirds, particularly in the semi-arid interior of the West. ...

'Personality-gene' makes songbirds curious

Whether you are an anxious type, or a fearless person - such individual differences in personality could be partly due to the genes you carry. In humans, it is hard to prove the existence of such "personality genes" - there are simply too many factors that influence human behaviour and these factor...

Displaced songbirds navigate in the high Arctic

By experimentally relocating migratory white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii) from their breeding area in the Canadian Northwest Territories to regions at and around the magnetic North Pole, researchers have gained new insight into how birds navigate in the high Arctic. In particu...

Migratory songbirds have a specialized night-vision brain area

Neurobiologists have discovered a specialized night-vision brain area in night-migratory songbirds. They believe the area might enable the birds to navigate by the stars, and to visually detect the earth's magnetic field through photoreceptor molecules, whose light-sensitivity is modulated by the f...

Noise pollution negatively affects woodland bird communities, says CU-Boulder study

...cies opt for noisy areas over quiet ones, perhaps because of their vocalization pitches, a reduction in nest predators and less competition from other songbirds that prefer quiet environments. The three-year study compared nesting birds inhabiting pinyon-juniper woodland sites surrounding natural gas extrac...

A bad performance is better than no performance at all

... When children grow up without contact to other humans they either develop no or a rudimentary form of human language. A similar scenario occurs in songbirds when juveniles are removed from their parents and are raised apart from the song of conspecifics. Although these birds develop song, it usually contai...

Conservationists seek to identify prime stopover sites for migrating birds

...he best stopover sites for migrating birds in the southern coastal zone of Lake Ontario. The study specifically focuses on Neotropical migrants. These songbirds summer in the subarctic part of Canada through northern New York and winter in Central America and the northern part of South America. The fieldwor...

Songbird study from CSHL, CCNY provides concrete measure of biology's impact on culture

...l to conduct in humans, but an analog has been performed among a species of songbirds called zebra finches. The study, which will appear online ahead of print o...his graduate student Olga Feher took up the experimental challenge, raising songbirds in soundproof boxes and collecting audio and video recordings of their subj...

Execretion analysis aids primate social studies

...n find ways to get acceptable samples, said Duke University biology professor Susan Alberts. When researchers first genetically analyzed the DNA of songbirds in 1987 for example, they found that avian species thought to be "quintessentially monogamous actually engage in what we politely call extra-pair copu...