Birds communicate in different ways through their cries – gigazin

Crows can count out loudResearch has shown that there are cases where birds were highly intelligent as well. For a long time, it was thought to be impossible for birds to speak, but research on bird vocalizations has revealed that they communicate vocally through their calls.

How did scientists begin to decode bird sounds? The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/21/how-scientists-started-to-decode-birdsong

Located in AustriaKonrad Lorenz Center for Behavioral and Cognitive ResearchSonia Kleindorfer, director of the biology department and an avian ecologist, was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania.SongbirdsMales sing, females do not. I had the idea that if a female screams, it means something is wrong. However, after taking up a research position at Flinders University in Australia, I confirmed that female songbirds also sing, and I have been conducting research on bird vocalizations ever since.

For example, Kleindorfer installed a camera and microphone in a wren's nest and monitored them. They discovered that the female wren was singing a lullaby while incubating her eggs in the nest. The baby bird, still in its embryonic state inside the egg, has underdeveloped ears and should not be able to hear sounds. “Why do they behave in a way that attracts predators?” asked Kleindorfer. He had doubts about that. However, when he compared the female's screams during incubation of eggs to the begging screams that the chicks make after hatching, he found that they were identical.

The pleading sounds of young birds differ depending on the nest in which they were raised, which indicates that birds learn their mother's voice while they are in the egg. Experiments in which eggs were transferred to other nests also confirmed that the hatched chicks imitated the voices of their parents in the nest, and not their genetic parents.

Embryonic learning of vocal passwords in splendid wrens reveals introduced cuckoo chicks: current biology
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)01125-6

According to Kleindorfer, this was a paradigm shift as songbirds were thought to learn their calls from their parents. Later, the same process was confirmed in many songbirds.

In the 1970s, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth confirmed in field experiments on savanna monkeys living in Kenya that animals communicate using different sounds. Experiments have shown that savanna monkeys use different calls to alert different predators: eagles, snakes, and leopards. Although young individuals sometimes make mistakes in the corresponding calls, as they grow they learn and begin to use the correct calls.

The results of this research were published in a research paper and book entitled “How Monkeys See the World.”

Amazon | How apes see the world: Inside the mind of another species Cheney, Dorothy L., Seyfarth, Robert M. | Monkeys and apes

It has been confirmed that the Siberian jay has three different vocalization patterns: 'when the hawk sits on a branch', 'when it flies', and 'when the hawk attacks the prey'.

In addition, the University of Tokyo has the world's first research facility exploring the meaning of these animal sounds and gestures, how they help them survive and reproduce, and what kind of cognitive abilities they evolved under. There is a laboratory specialized in this field of animal linguistics.

Suzuki Laboratory
https://www.animallinguistics.org/

Department of Animal Linguistics, Suzuki Laboratory | Tokyo University of Advanced Science and Technology Research Center
https://www.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ja/research/suzuki_lab.html

Associate Professor Toshiki Suzuki from the laboratory researched the calls of great tits during his university days, and discovered that they could be converted into words or sentences, and they could also make gestures using their wings.

Toshiki Suzuki “Vocal Communication and Cognitive Development in Birds” |. Toho University, College of Science, Department of Biology, Laboratory of Environmental Geology
https://www.lab.toho-u.ac.jp/sci/bio/geoeco/research/2007/suzuki.html

In addition, there is a project underway to use artificial intelligence to decode non-human communications.

Earth Types Project
https://www.earthspecies.org/