One rainy morning a week ago, I hear a beautiful bird song that I cannot quite identify. It’s longish, sweet and melodic. From in the bedroom, I glance over at the feeders and there’s the usual ...

Male zebra finches learn their song by imitating conspecifics. To stand out in the crowd, each male develops its own unique song. Because of this individual-specific song, it was long assumed that ...

A young zebra finch learning to sing may not sound like much at first, just a babbling stream of chirps and whistles. But ...

The mating song of a male Darwin's medium ground finch. Credit: Jeff Podos He knew, for instance, that beaks can either evolve powerfully to crush hard seeds or they can remain more delicate, thereby ...

Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content. Discovery News It goes a little something like this: A young male zebra finch, whose father taught him a song, shared that song with a ...

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 ...

AMHERST, Mass. – They say that hindsight is 20/20, and though the theory of ecological speciation — which holds that new species emerge in response to ecological changes — seems to hold in retrospect, ...