With a few minutes of searching, anyone can find videos online of chatty birds: macaws talk to their keepers, cockatoos sing to the camera, corvids mimic the jarring sounds of construction sites.
Research has shown that some birds can understand and use words in context — so, when Polly speaks up from inside her cage, she may really want a cracker — but scientists know far less about how birds use their vocal abilities in the wild. Christine Dahlin, professor of biology at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, is working to change that.
"Ultimately I really want to understand how these birds are communicating in the wild," she said. "I want to know what they are saying, and how they are saying it."
In one of the first steps to figuring this out, Dahlin and colleagues combined fieldwork, manual sorting and machine learning to begin to decode the warble duets of mated Yellow-naped Amazon parrots, a critically endangered species with a habitat that stretches from southern Mexico to southern Costa Rica. The researchers found these duets have language-like properties, including syntax, collocates and an impressive lexicon.
The work was published in the Journal of Avian Biology.
