A group of brain cells, the corticobasal ganglia projecting neurons, are important for vocal learning in young birds, but not in adult birds, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 21, 2019
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217
A father holds up his newborn, their faces only inches apart, and slowly repeats the syllables "da" and "dee." After months of hearing these sounds, the baby begins to babble and gradually "da da da" is refined to the word ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 3, 2019
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610
Birds may not have a word for maroon. Or burnt sienna. But show a zebra finch a sunset-colored object, and she'll quickly decide whether it looks more like "red" or "orange."
Plants & Animals
May 29, 2019
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111
For a small, reddish-beaked bird called the zebra finch, sexiness is color-coded. Males have beaks that range from light orange to dark red. But from a female's point of view, a male's colored bill may simply be hot, or not, ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 1, 2018
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193
Researchers at UC San Francisco have shown how the Bengalese finch, a domesticated songbird, can learn to tweak its song in specific ways depending on context, which could shed light on how the human brain learns to apply ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 16, 2017
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44
(Phys.org) —Chimpanzees may throw tantrums like toddlers, but their total brain size suggests they have more self-control than, say, a gerbil or fox squirrel, according to a new study of 36 species of mammals and birds ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 21, 2014
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0
(Phys.org) —A team of researchers from Japan, Israel and the U.S. has found evidence that suggests birds and human infants learn to string syllables together in roughly the same way: through stepwise improvement. In their ...
University of Utah researchers decoded the genetic blueprint of the rock pigeon, unlocking secrets about pigeons' Middle East origins, feral pigeons' kinship with escaped racing birds, and how mutations give pigeons traits ...
Biotechnology
Jan 31, 2013
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(Phys.org)—It has long been known that diversity of form and function in birds' specialized beaks is abundant. Charles Darwin famously studied the finches on the Galapagos Islands, tying the morphology (shape) of various ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 24, 2012
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0
(Phys.org)—Cross a crow and it'll remember you for years. Crows and humans share the ability to recognize faces and associate them with negative, as well as positive, feelings. The way the brain activates during that process ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 10, 2012
7
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The true finches are passerine birds in the family Fringillidae. They are predominantly seed-eating songbirds. Most are native to the Northern Hemisphere, but one subfamily is endemic to the Neotropics, one to the Hawaiian Islands, and one subfamily – monotypic at genus level – is found only in the Palaearctic. The scientific name Fringillidae comes from the Latin word fringilla for the Chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) – a member of that last subfamily – which is common in Europe.
Many birds in other families are also commonly called "finches", including some species in the very similar-looking waxbills or estrildid finches (family Passeridae, subfamily Estrildinae) of the Old World tropics and Australia; several groups of the bunting and American sparrow family (Emberizidae); and Darwin's finches of the Galapagos islands, which provided evidence of natural selection and are now recognized to be peculiar tanagers (Thraupidae).
Some species are being imported or smuggled into other countries and sold as exotic pets.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
