The sound of birds singing is synonymous with spring. As delightful as the tweets and chirps may be, these songs are actually tied to the birds’ survival — and a combination of day length, sunlight ...

Not all birds sing, but those that do — some several thousand species — do it a lot. All over the world, as soon as light filters over the horizon, songbirds launch their serenades. They sing to ...

When birds sleep, what are they dreaming about? Researchers from the University of Buenos Aires have figured out a way to tap into bird dreams. When a bird slumbers, its voice box, called the syrinx, ...

As the first light spills over the emerald canopy of India’s Western Ghats, the forest erupts in song. Birds trill, warble, and whistle in a delightful chorus that has fascinated biologists and ...

In my yard in Decatur the other morning, an unseen bird in a shrub belted out something that sounded like, “Drink your teeeee!” I knew immediately that it was an Eastern towhee. Then, a loud “cheerily ...

In the early days of animation, the world was greeted by a new kind of celebrity: the animated anthropomorphic animal. Disney had Mickey Mouse, Warner Bros. had Bugs Bunny, and Universal had Woody ...

The reason why birds make such a racket at dawn is still unclear. But researchers are now pouring cold water on one popular idea about why. Researchers have some new evidence about what makes birds ...

Tiny songbirds such as grosbeaks and warblers migrate thousands of miles, flying at night and resting during the day, to and from their wintering grounds—and unlike many larger birds, they often forgo ...

Light pollution makes birds work overtime. A behavioral analysis of nearly 600 bird species suggests that light pollution from human development can lengthen the time birds spend singing by nearly an ...

“In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,” the saying goes. The same may be said of birds. That’s because spring is when most birds turn to family obligations—they mate, ...

Source: fir0002, via Wikimedia Commons. Traditionally, birdsong has been viewed as a male trait, and this bias has dominated research on the behavior. “For a long time, scientists thought that female ...