A familiar bird arrives at the feeder, a little smaller than a sparrow, lighter and more nimble. It is a discrete maternal color, a streaky mix of pale and brownish-gray, well-suited to sit upon an ...

"I started working with these birds 25 years ago," says Jeffrey Podos, professor of biology at UMass Amherst and the paper's senior author. " In my very first publication on the finches, back in 2001, ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. The finches that call Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands home are ...

Walk outside and listen. Spring has officially begun and bird songs are everywhere. But, what are those birds serenading you every day? A list compiled by the website Stacker of the top birds spotted ...

Scientists have artificially altered the song of young birds by implanting song memories into their brains with light pulses, in a discovery which may lead to developments in the treatment of humans ...

Invasive parasites in the Galápagos Islands may leave some Darwin’s tree finches singing the blues. The nonnative Philornis downsi fly infests the birds’ nests and lays its eggs there. Fly larvae ...

Like humans who can instantly tell which friend or relative is calling by the timbre of the person's voice, zebra finches have a near-human capacity for language mapping. If songbirds could appear on ...

Complex learning processes like speaking or singing follow similar patterns. Using the example of zebra finches, researchers have investigated how young birds imitate the courtship songs of their ...

The beaks of Darwin's medium ground finches can evolve to crush the shells of hard seeds. Credit: Andrew Hendry They say that hindsight is 20/20, and though the theory of ecological speciation—which ...