At first, the birds didn’t respond to the calls. Then, for three days, they played the one of the calls alongside recorded fairy-wren alarm calls (and other familiar birds’ alarm calls) At the end of the training period, the birds would flee in response to the sound that had been paired with fairy-wren alarm calls, according to the paper published today in Current Biology.

Advertisement

“It suggests the training hasn’t just made them more wary, but rather they’d learned the meaning of the alarm call we paired with a known call,” Andy Radford, professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Bristol in the UK, told Gizmodo.

And the difference is impressive. According to the study, after training, birds fled in response to 81 percent of the newly trained sounds on the first day and 78 percent on the second day. The control group of birds, which heard a recorded sound not paired with any alarm call, fled in response to 38 percent of sounds they heard on day one and 19 percent on day two.

Advertisement

Here’s one of the choruses of alarming sounds mixed with fairy-wren and other bird calls:

Advertisement

The birds themselves don’t make alarm sounds when they flee, according to the paper, so there’s still more work to do in order to understand how this learning happens outside the experimental setting.

This experiment excels in a place where other animal research is often flawed—it studied wild animals in their natural habitats, rather than in a lab, where their behavior might be significantly altered by the unnatural environment. But there are still limitations to point out. Potvin noted that the researchers couldn’t control for the action of other surrounding birds not part of the study, who could have influenced the results. “We did try and make sure we knew what other individuals were around, and their reactions to the experimental process,” she said.

Advertisement

Next, the scientists hope to study how this social learning might change based on the environment, and if there are certain noises that the birds are more likely to be alarmed by. And what about mimicking birds—can birds who mimic predatory birds (like blue jays) teach others the calls to look out for?

And fairy-wrens probably aren’t the only social learners out there. “Fairy-wrens are smart—but they definitely aren’t the most intelligent bird species,” said Potvin. “So I think we could safely generalize these results to other birds, especially other songbirds.”

Advertisement

[Current Biology]