Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. GrrlScientist writes about evolution, ecology, behavior and health. But one thing that Mozart probably never knew about his ...

Scientists are rethinking the evolution of vocal learning in birds. New Zealand's smallest bird, the rifleman or titipounamu, may have a rudimentary version of the talent possessed by parrots, ...

Once again, the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) has an ERC-winning researcher. Tamás Faragó, a research fellow at the Department of Ethology, has won more than two and a half ...

The European starling boasts a remarkable repertoire. Versatile songbirds that learn warbles, whistles, calls, and songs throughout their lives, starlings rank among the most advanced avian vocal ...

The vocalizations of humans, bats, whales, seals and songbirds vastly differ from each other. But CMU and UC Berkeley researchers have found parts of the genome that have evolved and are associated ...

Neural recordings from parrots and songbirds reveal the ways in which vocal production is encoded in the brain, highlighting remarkable similarities between how parrots and humans learn to produce ...

Bonjour! Ni hao! Merhaba! If you move to a new country as an adult, you have to work much harder to get past that initial “hello” in the local language than if you’d moved as a child. Why does it take ...

A symphony of synapses fires every time a songbird sings. For Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, the neural pathways he finds particularly interesting inside a bird’s brain are ...

A very interesting study was just published that finds many parrots use words in appropriate contexts. This study, based on an analysis of almost 900 companion parrots as reported by a flock of ...

The better a songbird is at working its way around obstacles to retrieve a snack, the more complex its vocal learning ability will be. The European starling boasts a remarkable repertoire. Versatile ...