What’s in a song? Quite a lot, according to Professor of Biology Heather Williams ’77 of Williams College in Massachusetts. She’s the lead author of a recent high-profile study on the cultural ...

An error has occurred. Please try again. With a The Portland Press Herald subscription, you can gift 5 articles each month. It looks like you do not have any active ...

Song allows the bird to "speak" better than and other family of creatures. It is the perfect medium for communicating over long distances, or when it is hard to see the singer - and the audience: for ...

Dawn is beckoned by choruses of birds all around the world, but we still don't understand why our avian neighbours insist on ...

Waking up to the dawn chorus of birds—one of the natural world's greatest symphonies—is a joy like no other. It is not surprising that bird-watching has become an increasingly popular hobby. Subscribe ...

Many bird species are the expert wooers of the animal kingdom, courting mates with melodic love songs and grand displays of affection. The bellbird isn’t one of them. It prefers to blare its ...

The dramatic reduction in automobile traffic noise in San Francisco during the COVID-19 lockdown has allowed a common songbird to sing softer, more elaborate songs that are more appealing to the ...

Researchers have tracked muscle contractions in a bird's vocal tract, and reconstructed the song it was silently singing in its sleep. The resulting audio is a very specific call, allowing the team to ...

Winter is fading, spring is coming, and birds are singing. The distinctive songs of eastern meadowlarks roll across prairies surrounding our metropolis. The males perch on fence lines, fence poles and ...

The birds were singing something strange. Ken Otter and Scott Ramsay first noticed it in the early 2000s, when they were recording white-throated sparrows in Prince George, a city in western Canada.

poets and musicians, from Chaucer to Wordsworth, from Handel to Respighi. Birdsong can be a natural phenomenon of intense beauty. But our enjoyment is incidental to the main purpose, which is one bird ...