BIRDS EAVESDROOP LEARNING

BIRDS learn another 'language' by eavesdropping on neighbours.

WASHINGTON : For birds, understanding neighbourhood gossip about an approaching hawk or  brown snake can mean the difference between Life and Death.

Wild critters are known to listen each other for clues about lurking predators, effectively  eavesdropping on other species' chatter. Birds, for example,can learn to flee when neighbours cluck ''hawk!'' or, more precisely, emit a distress call.

The fairy wren, a small Australian songbird, is not born knowing the ''languages'' of other birds. But it can master the meaning of a  few key ''words''  as scientists explain in a paper published on Thursday in the journal  Current Biology.

'' We knew before that some animals can translate the meanings of other species' foreign languages,''  but we did not know how that 'language learning' came about,'' said Andrew Radford, a biologist at the University of Bristol and co-author of the study.

Birds have several ways of acquiring life skills. Some knowledge is innate, and some is acquired from direct experience.

Radford and other scientists are exploring a third kind of knowledge : ............acquiring information from peers.

Bradford and colleagues wandered around the  Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra with customised  ''tweeter speakers''  affixed to their wrists, looking for solitary fairy wrens.

They wanted to be certain that the birds would react only to sounds, not other birds behaviour.

The scientists first played the birds two unfamiliar recorded sounds, One was the alarm cry of an allopatric chestnut-rumped thornbill, a bird not native to Australia.

The other was a computer-generated bird sound dubbed ''buzz'' . On first hearing these sounds, the 16 fairy wrens had no particular reaction.

The scientists then trotted around the park and continued to play customised recordings.

They attempted to train half the birds to recognize the thornbill's alarm cry as a warning sound, and the other half to recognize the  computer-generated ''buzz'' as a distress call.

They did that by playing the previously unfamiliar sounds in conjunction with the noises that the birds already associated with danger, such as fairy wrens own distress cry.

After three days the scientists tested what the birds had learned and their feathered pupils passed the test.  [AFP]