How does the new 'language' bird learn?

Scientists explained in an article in Current Biology, a striptease, a small, beautiful bird of Australia, unable to understand the 'language' of other birds, but they can grasp the meaning of some important 'words' , such as reporting an enemy.

As you know, wild creatures have the ability to listen to each other to find clues about predators, eavesdropping effectively about the conversation of other species. For example, birds can learn to run away when neighbors shout "falcon!" , or make cries when in distress.

Andrew Radford, a biologist at Bristol University, said: 'Previously we knew that some animals could translate the meaning of the languages ​​of other species, but we didn't know how to' learn the language. 'how'

Australian wrenches can understand some of the alarms that have predators from other birds.

Birds have many ways to acquire life skills. Some knowledge is innate and some are taken from direct experience. Radford and other scientists are exploring a third type of knowledge: collecting information from the same type.

Radford and his colleagues at the Australian National University use small speakers mounted on their belts, wandering around the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra to search for lone wolves. They wanted to make sure that the wren would only react to the sound they prepared, not the behavior of other birds.

Scientists first opened the birds to two types of unfamiliar sounds: The first sound was the alarming sound of a rambler, a bird not native to Australia. The second sound is a bird sound created on a computer named "buzz".

The first time I heard these sounds, the wrenches didn't have any special reaction.

Scientists then went around the park and continued to play customized records. They tried to train half of the birds to recognize the warning calls of the bats, and the other half recognized the "buzz" sound made by the computer as a distress message.

They did it by broadcasting these sounds, combined with the sound that birds were aware of was dangerous, such as the groans of the wrenches.

Three days later, the scientists checked what the birds had learned, and their 'students' passed the test, when the two groups of wrenches responded to the sound they had trained by flying to find shelter. But completely indifferent to other sounds.

Explaining in a human way, this is like a person who knows only English who has learned that "Achtung" means "attention" or "dangerous" in German just by listening to speakers of the phrase. with the same meaning in many languages ​​at the same time.

Prior to this study, scientists knew something about how an animal guesses meaningful things from other species.