you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 12 points 8 months ago (3 children)

For the people saying birds only sing to attract mates, there was a post just a couple days ago about how an ornithologist pointed a hyper sensitive microphone at lone birds standing on a wire and could hear them softly singing to themselves at nearly imperceptible levels even when they were entirely alone.

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • Also, their calls are a language.

    I should find it, there's a video about a japanese researcher who identified that certain calls mean "threat", or "threat: snake" and they follow grammar rules, meaning "snake threat" doesn't provoke any kind of scattering behavior. These calls are also understood cross-species to some extent. Birds that speak different "dialects" can still understand each other.

    [edit] Here's one. And here's the second.

  • source
  • parent