Scientists discover surprising language 'shortcuts' in birdsong – like humans
manchester.ac.uk50 points by gnufx 7 days ago
50 points by gnufx 7 days ago
Based on years of daily close observation, I’m fairly certain most bird species sing/speak multiple different languages.
Predator warning calls are universally understood as warnings, even though species like great and blue tits tend to also vocalize to identify the threat after the warning. All birds in the same ecology recognize the warning part.
The ”danger remains, stay put” call is a long, single high tone, repeated every couple seconds. All the small birds know to sit still on a branch until the calls have ceased.
Those are examples of a ”universal language”, messages broadcast as wide as possible.
Another language type is calls specific to one species (and friends), a ”friend language”, if you will. This includes things like ”hey, where are you”, ”hey, where’s food” and ”hey, there’s food, come here”. These calls are invariably called at a lower volume than the universal ones: birds don’t like party crashers, especially if there’s not enough food to go around for all the flocks in the neighborhood.
Last, there is a ”familial language” optimized for information transfer. It is often used when a parent bird is teaching their young to be a bird. It sounds nothing like the other languages, and is best described as ”modem sounds”: dense bursts of modulated chirps which can only be heard a few meters away, only when no other birds are present and the situation is safe.
I believe this last one is practically undocumented in ornithological literature, or dismissed as meaningless ”warbling”. However, as it is the most information-dense bird language, I think it needs the most study.
Four years ago, I wrote that to me, Transformers' most exiting application could be translating whale's songs. I was obviously very wrong (won't be the first time, won't be the last), but I imagine recording of birds should be more numerous than whales', so maybe someday, hopefully, transformers would integrate bird songs to the list of languages they can translate to and from.
How will you train this? I understand it replicating bird songs, but what data will it use for actual translation?
It would operate a lot like image recognition tasks, probably in frequency 0 domain for a concrete space to operate in. SLID or other information theoretic approaches could isolate common signals, then translate that to captured environmental information (e.g prairie dogs identifying predators).
Animals don't use a known syntax per se, so it wouldn't be authentic translation, but a transliteration may be possible. Also, there is no guarantee that one animal doing something (like a dog's behavior for going to the bathroom) maps to many or all dogs.
The Crowsetta Stone
Amazing, I gave it a recording and it gave an analysis.
Do you know how to hear the generated sounds? Pressing the buttons shows a "playing" console message but there's no audio.
Probably the same way many other models are trained: autoregression or autoencoding. You'd either predict the next symbol, or you compress it into a latent space and reconstruct the original. My assumption is that birdsong is sequential, but this isn't something I know about. An entire song might be the smallest semantic unit, like the alien language in Arrival, though I think this is unlike.
Sometimes birds communicate via melody (songbirds), sometimes via repetition (ducks, geese), sometimes via timbre (pigeons, doves), and sometimes via a combination of the former and sound-making in general.
Sometimes birds communicate nonverbally as well, as in gaze direction and body posture.
> but what data will it use for actual translation?
I'm no ornithologist, for forgive my ignorance, but shouldn't there be bunch of papers out there where researchers try to infer the meaning of various sounds birds produce, together with a description of the sound and even samples of it? I don't know how numerous that could be, but could maybe be used as a starting point at least.
There are large datasets of bird sounds (eBird, Cornell Labs, etc), but the descriptions are usually limited to the species, location, and something like “mating call” or “contact call”. Hugely useful for building models that can recognise birds by call (apps like that already exist, I recommend Merlin Bird ID), but definitely not enough for something approaching actual translation.
FWIW there’s no research to indicate that the sounds birds make are what we’d call language. They’re avid communicators, and some species are known to be highly intelligent, but of course it’s not like “caw” means “to fly” and “craah” is “forward”.
I’ve been winter feeding the local birds for a couple years now, and especially the great tits acknowledge my presence via a special call I haven’t heard anywhere else. It’s distinct from the calls they use when they find food otherwise. Bird ID applications consistently fail to recognize the species based on that call.
There are stationary feeders in the neighborhood, but the birds don’t seem to associate the humans filling them with their food, and subsequently just use warning calls when they see humans approaching the feeders.
But whenever they see me, even in the summer, they use that call. Blue tits have their own, shorter variation of it.
I like to think they’ve given me a name in their language :-)
> I like to think they’ve given me a name in their language :-)
Probably best for everyone involved to not understand the meaning of the name they gave you too! :)
It would need contextual information of what the bird is communicating about and to whom. 360 degree video with object/species detection and a custom bird/flock behavior classifier?
I would actually be quite curious what the crows get to talk around 6 AM on nearby trees for about half an hour, before leaving for their daily duties.
Not sure how everything would go, if we finally managed to talk with fellow species, given how wrong it goes even with other humans.
That's the country wide weather report. And they need to recite it so whole that it spreads from the point of origin otherwise it would be just a local update. Fascinating stuff. Humans used to do much the same when radio first came along.
Lovely. :)
Plot twist: 50 years from now they really decode it and it turns out to be exactly that. I'll be eating some crow if that should be the case.
It may be that whales are using their song not just as inter-species communication, but as a farming method for their desired food. Could it be a "lullaby" to the krill? Or a signal which causes the krill to group closer together, thereby increasing the efficiency of the whales' feeding activities?
Many bat species use ultrasonic pulses to detect moths and other flying insects while hunting, so whalesong may even be some form of longer range food detecting sonar? I'm not sure if that amount of distributed biomass would be detectable, but we don't know enough about their sensing apparatus to completely rule it out. Interestingly, some moth species have learned to jam the signal sent by bats by emmiting loud clicks, disrupting the return signal to throw off their target triangulation ability. I don't think the krill are so equipped, unfortunately for them! My guess is if their (whale) numbers were higher, they wouldn't consume their preferred food source in an unsustainable manner, giving the krill time to recover and moving on to larger patches to allow the recently "grazed" areas time to recover. One thing is for sure, their song activity is at least partly related to their feeding and migration activity in some way:
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2020/10/01/Blue-whale-singi...
Also, studies have found that whalesong differs in frequency range depending on where in the world they are, possibly relating to water temperature and overall salinity/acidity, as colder/warmer and alkaline/acidic water will have different sonic properties due to density changes in the transmission medium, or the increase in ocean activity from shipping and ULF emmissions from submarines, and the overall effect of sea surface temperatures increasing. Blue Whales for example are known to feed at relatively shallow depths (<200m) as that's where the krill gather during the daytime. The interesting thing is there is an overall downward trend in the sonic frequency observed in the last several decades:
https://www.encyclopedie-environnement.org/en/zoom/decline-f... & https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/whale-s...
The recent articles in the press regarding the decline of Blue Whales' song in the pacific seems to point to the fact that they signal for abundance of their food source after locating it, like ringing a dinner bell when it's feeding time. This along with other factors like simply conserving their energy for further search activity could explain the increasingly infrequent song activity. With their population still recovering as a result of industrial whaling (global estimates are ~10,000-15,000), perhaps this behaviour is emergent, like a social call to help other whales feed, boosting their long term chances of survival in the changing ocean environment:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-hea...
Finally, I spotted this interesting looking project regarding whale communication if you're interested (unsure how active it is currently):
Don't monkeys on a typewriter with a space bar also have the same statistical property?
That’s why the researchers used
> … a new open-source computational tool called ZLAvian, which compares real-world observed patterns to simulated ones to determine if ZLA is present.
I'm not doubting that the finding is there, I'm expressing scepticism that it means very much. If you randomly sample uniformly from the set {"a", "b", " "} repeatedly, the "word "ab" will appear much more often than the "word", "aaaaaabbbbababa". Doesn't say very much about language itself though.
You got me interested in the question, and one of the first things I found out is that there is Zipf’s Law, and then there is Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation.
Monkeys-randomly-typing is one of many processes which will indeed generate sequences conforming to the former, and it is perhaps the exceptions which are most interesting.
The latter law observes that the former generally applies to sequences generated for communication, having semantics and usually a grammar. While this may be the expected finding, there is value in having this expectation empirically verified.
Interesting comment since this is from the university of Manchester. Is this a late return to monkey news?
Another write up here, with infographics:
https://phys.org/news/2025-08-birdsong-patterns-zipf-law-abb...
They went with a robin for their leading image. The robin (both american and european) is notorious for it's wide ranging vocabulary. It can mimic many other birdcalls:
https://www.sibleyguides.com/2011/04/vocal-copying-by-americ...
Link to original study: