The Horn News – For birds, understanding neighborhood gossip about an approaching hawk or brown snake can mean the difference between life or death.

Wild critters are known to listen to each other for clues about lurking predators, effectively eavesdropping on other species’ chatter. Birds, for example, can learn to flee when neighbors cluck “hawk!” — or, more precisely, emit a distress call.

The fairy wren, a small Australian songbird, is not born knowing the “languages” of other birds. But it can master the meaning of a few key “words,” as scientists explain in a paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

“We knew before that some animals can translate the meanings of other species’ ‘foreign languages,’ but we did not know how that ‘language learning’ came about,” said Andrew Radford, a biologist at the University of Bristol and co-author of the study. Continue reading →