Biologists teach birds a foreign language in Australia

SYDNEY, July 16 (UPI) -- There's an emerging population of bilingual birds in Australia, thanks the work of researchers at the Australian National University.

Scientists there have been trying to understand how some bird species are able to eavesdrop on other species and glean valuable information. In doing so, they've managed to teach some birds a new language.

Researchers say the new findings could be used to train young birds, recuperating in captivity, to recognize the sounds of danger before they are released back into the wild.

Scientists already knew bird species pick up the language of other species to gather information on potential danger. To see if they could teach captive birds to acquire new languages, researchers played a series of distress calls to fairy wrens while throwing a large, bird-like model glider over top the birds, causing them to scatter.

Eventually, the birds learned to associate the two stimuli and began to scatter at the playing of the sound alone. The birds didn't react to other sounds unassociated with the original glider training.

"We had been doing experiments on learning using different methods, but until then with little success," Robert Magrath, from the ANU Research School of Biology, said in a press release. "So it was exciting to finally crack the practical problems of carrying out this experiment, and get clear results."

Magrath and his colleagues detailed their latest success in the journal Current Biology.