For a reddish-beaked bird called the zebra finch, sexiness is color-coded. Males have beaks that range from light orange to dark red. But to females, a male's colored bill may simply be hot, or not, ...

Male (left) and female (right) zebra finches. The orange feathers displayed by the male are colored by the pigment pheomelanin, which is also present in human skin and red hair. Pheomelanin is ...

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 ...

Juvenile birds learn the length of the sounds in a song from a false memory introduced via optogenetics, instead of from real interactions with a tutor bird. Young zebra finches that receive feedback ...

Here’s a kind of crazy question that sounds like the beginning of a joke — or maybe Japanese Koan: How do 70 live zebra finches play about a dozen electric guitars? Well the answer can be found ...

Calling someone a bird-brain may not be the insult it was intended to be. Although small in size, some birds' brains, such as ...

Every time a zebra finch lands, takes off, or hops on the guitars' strings, the notes play through a nearby amplifier. Courtesy of Ben Mirin The young male zebra finch alighted on the nearest guitar ...

Like humans who can instantly tell which friend or relative is calling by the timbre of the person's voice, zebra finches have a near-human capacity for language mapping. If songbirds could appear on ...

Species must reproduce to survive, and animals have found unique ways of achieving this. For some, including us, it seems as though producing a few offspring that require extended care is the best ...

Zebra finches fire up brain regions and vibrate their vocal cords in ways that mimic singing, even while asleep. Flickr/Michael Lawton Zebra finches are so good at singing, they could do it in their ...