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Several online news sources had this story yesterday: like most animal noises, birdsong is now generally understood to be linguistic in nature -- birds sing to denote territory, attract mates, spread alerts, and so on. But now it seems that some birds are multi-lingual. In particular, it seems that nuthatches understand chickadee vocalization and know when chickadees are warning each other about predators in the area.
The article goes on to say that it's the number and frequency of the "dee-dee-dee" sound the little birds make when they utter their signature "chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee" call that indicates the threat level; the more "dee-dee-dee", the higher the threat. Not unlike the Gestapo's "Terror Alert" system, except that the chickadees know the difference between a real wolf and a fake one.
I guess this means that jungle animals understand the monkeys who scream alarms when the tiger approaches?
Posted by Karan [URL] at 03/21/07
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