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It is known among aviculturists that cockatiels imitate human music with their whistle-like vocal sounds. Yoshimasa Seki, a professor of Psychology Department of Aichi University, examined whether cockatiels are also able to sing in unison, or, line up their vocalizations with a musical melody so that they occur at the same time.
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Some songbirds learn to sing by listening to other birds. Some other animals can learn to copy sounds. But what does that tell us about human speech? Sonja Vernes from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen is lead editor of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on vocal learning in animals and humans, bringing together research on animals ranging from seals and bats to birds and humans.
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That a parrot can copycat sounds is nothing new. But vocal learning is not common in animals. Researcher Carel ten Cate of the Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) of Leiden University has now discovered a duck species that can imitate sounds. "It started with an obscure reference about an Australian musk duck and ended in a nice paper."
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Ever wondered why birds are born to peep, chirrup and sing? Surprisingly international avian experts have shown this to be true, literally, after finding fluctuations in bird species' heartbeat responses to their parents' calls—from inside the egg.
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A team of researchers from the University of Vienna working with a colleague at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences has observed wild Goffin's cockatoos making and using tools to crack open and eat sea mangos—the first-ever example of a wild non-primate making and using a set of tools. They've published their observations in the journal Current Biology.
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The rise and fall of Earth's land surface over the last three million years shaped the evolution of birds and mammals, a new study has found, with new species evolving at higher rates where the land has risen most.
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Decades of research have been dedicated to understanding humpback whale songs. Why do they sing? What and where is the intended audience of these songs? To help uncover the answers, many scientists have framed whale songs as something similar to bird songs: vocalizations designed for attracting potential mates, or warnings to competitors.
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Sites favored by illegal cannabis farmers on the West Coast of the United States overlap with the habitat ranges of three threatened predators, potentially exposing them to toxic pesticides, according to a study by Greta Wengert at the Integral Ecology Research Center in California and colleagues, publishing September 1 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
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How do birds avoid collision when flying in dense foliage and other cramped environments with many obstacles? And what does flying in such complex environments entail for the birds? These were the questions Per Henningsson of Lund University in Sweden pondered before engaging the help of the family's own pet budgie to get some answers. His study has now been published in Royal Society Open Science.
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Despite a few high-profile conservation success stories—like the dramatic comeback of bald eagle populations in North America—birds of prey are in decline worldwide.
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When the world's leading conservation congress kicks off Friday in the French port city of Marseille it will aim to deliver one key message: protecting wildlife must not be seen as a noble gesture but an absolute necessity—for people and the planet.
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Pennsylvanians can feed birds again.
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Researchers from the University of Kent, the Research Institute for Environment Treatment and Vita-Market Ltd have discovered the universal mathematical formula that can describe any bird's egg existing in nature, a feat which has been unsuccessful until now.
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The number of vertebrate species inhabiting the different regions of the world is highly variable, as is the proportion of threatened species. Some regions, such as the tropics, have more threatened species than is expected given the total number of species. Yet the vulnerability of the ecosystems facing the ongoing loss of species does not depend only on the species number but also on their ecological role. These roles depend on the characteristics of the species; their size, weight, shape, reproductive capacity, or the food resource they use. If threatened species have similar characteristics to non-threatened species, the loss of functions due to the extinction of threatened species might be compensated by other species. In contrast, if threatened species have unique characteristics, their loss can have a dramatic effect on the functioning of ecosystems, and the services they provide to human well-being.
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Urbanization is one of the most drastic forms of land-use change, and its negative consequences on biodiversity have been studied extensively in temperate countries such as Germany. However, less research has been conducted in tropical regions from the Global South, where most of the ongoing and future urbanization hotspots are located, and little is known about its effects on agricultural biodiversity and associated ecosystems. A research team from the University of Göttingen and the University of Hohenheim, in collaboration with the University of Agricultural Sciences of Bangalore in India, investigated the effects of urbanization on farmland bird communities in and around Bangalore, a city of over 10 million inhabitants in South India. They found that urbanization homogenizes farmland bird communities, filtering out species with certain functional traits, such as insect-eating birds, which are important for pest control. The results were published in Global Change Biology.
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The housing market in most parts of Australia is notoriously competitive. You might be surprised to learn we humans are not the only ones facing such difficulties.
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A predator doesn't need to have the quickest speed or reflexes to catch a bird. In a paper publishing August 23 in the journal Current Biology, researchers report the first documented evidence of a tortoise going in for the kill: biting the head of, killing, and eating a tern chick. This is the first time such behavior has been captured on camera, and it's likely not the only case of tortoise bird slaughter that's occurred.
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Worldwide, the cost of bird collisions with planes has been estimated at $1.2 billion per year. But information on bird movements throughout the year can help avoid damage to aircraft and risk to passengers. Scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and partners have been looking for patterns in bird strike data from three New York City area airports. Their findings were published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology.
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A team of researchers working at the University of Cambridge, has found that Eurasian jays are sensitive to cognitive illusions designed to fool humans. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the group describes experiments they conducted that involved exposing jays to magic tricks and what they learned from them.
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A new long-term study led by Sahas Barve, a Peter Buck Fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, finds that male acorn woodpeckers breeding polygamously in duos or trios of males actually fathered more offspring than males breeding alone with a single female, contrary to conventional thinking among biologists that monogamous males necessarily produce more offspring than those in polygamous groups. For females, polygamy is less of a slam dunk but co-breeding duos left behind the same number of offspring as the birds that coupled up, while female trios left behind fewer offspring than either group.
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The ability to adjust to changing environmental conditions is an essential prerequisite for species to cope with climate change. Using stable isotope analysis, a team of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) now unraveled the link between wintering destinations of Eurasian Golden Oriole migrations and rainfall intensities in potential wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa. Analyzing historical feathers from 1818 to 1971, they identified two distinct wintering areas whose use depended on prevailing rainfall intensity. The link between the key migratory overwintering destination and local precipitation demonstrates the dependence of these birds on rainfall in sub-Saharan Africa—a parameter that might change with climate change and related processes of desertification. The results are published in the scientific journal Global Change Biology.
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Duck species in Finland are faring poorly, with more than half of the species listed as threatened to a varying degree, with alien predators as one of the suspected causes.
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In addition to being visually stunning, schools of herring, herds of wildebeest and countless other groups of organisms that act in concert can help complex ecosystems maintain their diversity and stability, new research by Oregon State University shows.
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A new study from Tel Aviv University and the Weizmann Institute revealed that over the last 20,000-50,000 years, birds have undergone a major extinction event, inflicted chiefly by humans, which caused the disappearance of about 10 to 20 percent of all avian species. The vast majority of the extinct species shared several features: they were large, they lived on islands, and many of them were flightless.
Exposure to metals changes gene regulation in wild great tit populations
in Bird Research in the Media
Posted
Epigenetic changes are one of the less studied mechanisms via which organisms adapt to environmental changes. Epigenetic changes, such as DNA methylation, do not alter DNA sequence, but regulate gene expression. Two new studies showed that nestling exposure to metals, lead and arsenic, alters great tit DNA methylation patterns. This could influence gene expression, and either help to adapt to polluted environments or lead to detrimental, even long-lasting, consequences.
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