If you're not a bird person, you may not be able to distinguish between the different sounds birds make. Birdsong - the courting and territorial vocalization of songbirds - has been studied for decades, but less is understood about bird chatter, or the other chirps made by all flock members throughout the day. Now, we have new insights into the meanings of their chat, thanks to Julie Elie, an associate project scientist in Berkeley's department of neuroscience research.
Elie has spent years listening to the zebra finch, a small, social songbird. Her patient studies have yielded new insights into the language of the tiny finches, and won her the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize, which rewards progress towards interspecies communication.
"Every day I'm coming to work and I'm trying to find out, okay, what is this animal telling me?" Elie says. Originally from France, she says she's always been interested in how animals communicate. She visited wild zebra finches in the Australian outback, spending weeks patiently recording their chats, but found herself limited by field constraints (songbirds move around a lot!). Identifying and understanding the contexts of the sounds she was hearing were both key to unlocking their language, but mostly inaccessible. Back on campus, in aviaries, it became a bit easier to connect vocalizations to birds' behaviors.
Elie was able to compile an audio dictionary of zebra finches' "words," or call-types, describing their specific meanings, such as hunger, distress, alarm or need for contact. She then put her dictionary to the test and directly asked the birds, using operant tasks of vocalization classification that rewarded songbirds when they resolved them. Slowly and systematically deepening her understanding of the information conveyed by these finch vocalizations, she and her team were able to validate their dictionary.
Comparing the performance of birds in the classification task to that of AI, they demonstrated that the finch perception of vocalizations goes beyond the acoustic properties of sounds. While birds have a true understanding of their vocalizations, AI only hears meaningless chatter - and that leads to different responses of these agents, therefore indicating that finches have a mental representation of the meaning of their vocalizations. It was the very human, multimodal observations of finches' behaviors that were key to understanding their vocalizations.
"Now, I can come into a colony, and I listen to the chat, and I can hear what's going on," Elie says with a smile.
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