Ithaca, NY—For thousands of years, people have been keeping wild birds. It is often a deeply ingrained part of the culture. One of the more recent trends to emerge from this practice is the singing ...

Video demonstrating vocal learning by juvenile zebra finches. A baby’s babbling may sound like nonsense, but it’s actually an extended act of trial-and-error ...

Not all birds sing, but those that do — some several thousand species — do it a lot. All over the world, as soon as light filters over the horizon, songbirds launch their serenades. They sing to ...

Birdsong is more than just mimicry. Birds learn to sing through complex brain processes similar to human speech learning. This fascinating behaviour reveals how memory, repetition, and social ...

This story is part of our summer Book Club conversation about Jennifer Ackerman’s book ‘The Genius of Birds.’ Want to participate? Sign up for our newsletter or send us your thoughts on the SciFri ...

Most professional singers agree that practice makes perfect. And now research published in Nature Communications shows that songbirds also rely on a daily vocal workout—if they want to impress ...

When you open a window at midday and hear birds singing, it can feel like a small gift. In many cases, it is also a clue about what your local environment is doing right, because birds usually invest ...

poets and musicians, from Chaucer to Wordsworth, from Handel to Respighi. Birdsong can be a natural phenomenon of intense beauty. But our enjoyment is incidental to the main purpose, which is one bird ...

For thousands of years, people have been keeping wild birds. It is often a deeply ingrained part of the culture. An examination of the scientific literature on this topic finds that bird-singing ...