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Scientists found that when a mockingbird sings a cardinal’s song, it actually mimics the muscular patterns of the cardinal.
Marsh warblers are known to sing a wild, urgent, international pastiche of a song peppered with the tunes of more than one hundred other species. Some of the songs are European, picked up at its nesting grounds, but most are African, plucked from the neighborhoods of Uganda, where it spends its winters. Its imitated songs of the Boran cisticola, vinaceous dove, and brubru shrike create a kind of acoustic map of its African travels.
The lyrebird is renowned as a champion sound thief.
walking in the Australian forest when suddenly you’re confronted “by a fowl-like, brown bird which...
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crested lark in southern Germany that learned to imitate the four whistling notes a shepherd used to work his herding dogs. So faithful were the imitations that the dogs instantly obeyed the bird’s whistled commands, which included “Run ahead!” “Fast!” “Halt!” and “Come here!” These whistled calls subsequently spread to other larks, creating a little pocket of local “catchphrases” (and, quite possibly, some very winded sheepdogs).
The New Yorker once reported that “after weeks of silence, the first words uttered by a Westchester parakeet were, ‘Talk, damn you, talk!’”
For birds, with no lips and with tongues that generally aren’t used for making sounds, it’s a tall order to take on the nuances of human speech. This may explain why only a handful of species have accomplished the skill.
The African grey parrot is the parliamentarian of the bird world. Irene Pepperberg made African greys and their speech abilities famous through her work with Alex, perhaps the world’s most renowned talking bird.
Alex could answer with near perfect specificity. For example, if she showed him a green wooden square, he could say what color it was, what shape, and, after touching it, what it was made of.
Alex was not alone in his badinage. One African grey I know, Throckmorton, pronounces his name with Shakespearean precision.
will join him in a chorus of barking, “making my house sound like a kennel,” says Karin. “Again, he’s pitch perfect; no one can tell it’s a parrot barking and not a dog.”
AS EARLY AS 350 B.C., Aristotle noted that songbirds learn to sing.
Darwin remarked on it, too. He knew that birds had an instinct to sing just as we have an instinct to speak, but they learn the songs themselves, just as we learn languages.
To sort out the nature-nurture dilemma, ornithologist Amelia Laskey tried hand-raising a mockingbird in the late 1930s. One August morning she drove to a park five miles from her house, pulled a baby mockingbird out of a nest, and took him home to study. Honey Child was nine days old.
along with the squeak of the washing machine downstairs and the whistles of the mailman and Mr. Laskey calling the dog.
that obliging little bird from Australia, the zebra finch.
The zebra finch does not quite measure up, but it does make an excellent animal model for vocal learning.
A young male zebra finch learns a single love song from his father or other males in his first ninety days after hatching and faithfully repeats that song throughout life.
These are ten times as dense as ours, and much more varied, allowing birds to detect high-pitched sounds beyond our range, as well as the soft rustling of insects beneath soil or leaves. (If a bird’s hair cells are damaged by disease or loud noises—say, by the blasting decibels of a rock concert in a domed stadium—they can regenerate. Ours can’t.)
In one region, the high vocal center (HVC), specialized cells make fine distinctions in the sounds the chick hears, noting even the slightest millisecond-length differences in the duration of song notes, and firing only when the notes fall within a narrow range. This is the same strategy of pattern recognition we humans use—called categorical perception—to spot subtle sound differences in language, say, between “ba” and “pa.”
This discovery—that some young birds are capable of learning almost any song they hear yet possess a genetic template that predisposes them to their species’ song—has a human parallel. Young children have a remarkable capacity to acquire any of the world’s six thousand human languages without formal training, which suggests that we’re genetically predisposed for the task of language learning.
If a bird has no tutor, it sings a song that’s unrecognizable or only a poor rendition. Baby birds raised without any exposure to a tutor song sing abnormally, usually a very stunted, simplified version of the species song. This is true for humans, too. Children with normal hearing who are raised without any exposure to human speech utter abnormal vocalizations.
The window of song learning for a zebra finch is open only so long. When the young bird starts to sing, he’ll imitate the tutor’s song only from this early sensitive period. Then around the time he becomes an adult, the gates of song learning close. Why this is so is a puzzle that goes to the heart of our own learning—and its limitations.
London’s research has shown that young birds exposed to a tutor learn easily until they reach the age of sixty-five days. Thereafter, learning ability shuts down, and the bird’s songs remain fixed for life.
But young birds isolated from this song exposure can learn well even after sixty-five days.
In birds like the mockingbird, canary, and cockatoo, the gates of learning stay open for longer, so they can continue to add new songs as they grow older. But learning is harder for adults than for juveniles.
Babies learn languages with incredible speed. In the first two or three years of life, they can, with little effort, become fluent in two or even three languages and forever after sound like a native speaker. After puberty, we have to work a lot harder to learn a foreign language and have difficulty speaking without an accent.
Still, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to throw open those doors when we needed to—say, if we wanted to learn Urdu at age sixty? To my mind, a mockingbird’s ability to sing thrush or chickadee at three or four years is not all that far off from a baby boomer taking on Cantonese.
A song well sung offers its own reward, a “bolus” of feel-good chemicals such as dopamine and opioids. Dopamine may provide the drive to sing; opiates, the reward—the closer the match to the template, the bigger the reward.
Sleep seems to play a role in song learning for young birds, just as it does in human learning. A growing body of research suggests that the human brain continues to process the learning of a new motor skill after active training has stopped and during the sleep that follows it.
says Richard Mooney, “and I can’t for the life of me tell the difference. But the females can. They care that males are performing in this more precise stereotyped way.”
These studies suggest an intriguing idea: that the mental and cognitive state of a male bird shifts when he knows he’s being evaluated.
All of this is powerful proof that social cues shape learning behavior in birds—just as they do in humans.
canaries, who learn new songs each mating season,
A new theory by Shigeru Miyagawa and his colleagues suggests that human language arose from a kind of fusing of the melodic components of birdsong and the more utilitarian, content-rich types of communication used by other primates. “It’s this adventitious combination that triggered human language,” suggests Miyagawa, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Miyagawa is not suggesting that birdsong literally gave rise to human language; the two systems of communication did not evolve from a common ancestor. But sometime in the past fifty thousand to eighty thousand years, he says, the two approaches to communication merged in the form of language as we recognize it today. “Yes, human language is unique,” says Miyagawa, “but its two components have antecedents in the animal world. According to our hypothesis, they came together uniquely in human language.”
But what’s really similar in bird and human brains—and not found in species that are not vocal learners—is the presence of the song- or word-production areas and the connections, or pathways, linking song- (or word-) perception areas to these song- (or word-) producing motor areas.
Parrots have a kind of supercharged “song system within a song system” that may help them pick up different dialects of parrot speech.
in Thoreau’s words, lets rip “his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances.”
Animals with complex vocal learning are usually either at the top of the food chain, such as humans, elephants, whales, and dolphins; or they’re good at getting away from their predators, such as some songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds.
Okanoya studies Bengalese finches, a domesticated strain of the wild-rumped munia, bred in Asia for their plumage, not their song.
“So what I think is happening,” says Jarvis, is that vocal learning is being selected against by predators—making it rare—but it’s being selected for by sexual selection. Maybe that’s how it worked in humans, too.”