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Birds communicate with their flockmates through song, calls, and body language. Studies have shown that the intricate territorial songs of some birds must be learned at an early age, and that the memory of the song will serve the bird for the rest of its life. Some bird species are able to communicate in several regional varieties of their songs.
The remarkable behavior of large-brained animals such as primates and cetacea have claimed special attention, but all sorts of animals large and small (birds, fish, ants, bees, and others) have been brought into the laboratory or observed in carefully controlled field studies.
Social learning does not necessarily mean that the transmitted behavior is the most efficient response to a stimulus. If a socially learned behavior expends unnecessary energy, and there is a more efficient strategy that is not being utilized, employing social learning is maladaptive. This has been experimentally demonstrated in guppies.
Such birds are called "imprints" in falconry. When an imprint must be bred from, the breeder lets the male bird copulate with their head while they are wearing a special hat with pockets to catch the male bird's semen. The breeder then courts a suitable imprint female bird (including offering food, if it is part of that species's normal courtship).
The birds were tested on their ability to distinguish benign from malignant human breast histopathology images and could even apply what they had learned to previously unseen images. However, when faced with a more challenging task, they reverted to image memorisation and thus showed little generalisation to novel examples.
Located in the eastern and southern parts of North America, these white-crowned song-birds exhibit learned vocal behavior. Marler and Tamura found that while song variation existed between individual birds, each population of birds had a distinct song pattern that varied in accordance to geographical location.
Bird song is an example of learned territorial defense. Studies show that birds with high-quality songs will use them as a stimulus to deter predators from their territorial range. [13] Higher quality songs have been proven to act as the best defense mechanism in a variety of bird species, such as the red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus ...
Another example of a behavior that has been described as a fixed action pattern is the egg-retrieval behavior of the greylag goose, reported in classic studies by Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. [5] Like many ground-nesting birds, if an egg becomes displaced from the nest, the greylag rolls it back to the nest with its beak.