This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Just like humans have to learn to talk, songbirds aren't born singing.

They have to learn to carry a tune.

So in the beginning they just babble.

Raisa de Boer, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

And they learn from a tutor, so they need an example song in order to learn it.

She says that example song might come from the chick's father.

And over time, the baby bird tweaks that tweet to make it its own.

And then it takes almost a year until they're fully adult and until the next spring for the final song to come out.

Debor and her colleagues investigated that song learning process in canaries, using two groups

of baby birds.

The first consisted of inbred birds whose parents were siblings.

The second had parents that were unrelated. And the researchers found that the songs of inbred birds,

and those of the other outbred birds.

Sounds pretty similar to the human ear.

I cannot tell the difference.

But computer analysis revealed that the inbred birds sang notes at slightly different pitches and with tones that were not quite as pure.

So basically they sang out of tune in comparison to outbred birds.

The results appear in the proceedings of the Royal Society B.

And even though our untrained ears have a hard time telling the tones apart, female canaries seem to notice. They tend to delay smaller eggs and fewer of them when they made it with inbred birds,

as opposed to the better songsters,

suggesting that the quality of a songbird's genes

...