Just like humans, young songbirds are thought to learn their vocalizations by listening to adults — a process that has been studied in the laboratory but never experimentally in the wild, until now.
A new investigation, published Thursday in Current Biology, demonstrates that wild birds learn to sing based on sounds they hear in the first year of their life.
“This research is the first direct experimental demonstration of vocal learning in wild birds,” said UWindsor biology professor Dan Mennill, lead author of the study.
“We used loudspeakers to simulate the voices of wild birds, and we broadcast songs with distinctive acoustic features to five generations of birds. We found that young savannah sparrows learned the distinctive songs from the loudspeakers, demonstrating the phenomenon of vocal learning in wild animals.”
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Image via University of Windsor.