This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

Only a few kinds of animals are known to learn their vocalizations from listening to others.

Us, of course, elephants, bats, cetaceans, that's whales and dolphins,

pinnipeds, which is walruses, seals, and sea lions,

and parrots, hummingbirds, and sea lions, and parrots,

and songbirds.

That's it.

When your cat, meows, or your dog barks,

it does that because it has genetically inherited that sound.

But birds are like us, young animals have to hear adults in order to develop normal sounds.

University of Windsor biologist Daniel Menel. There have been hundreds of conventional experiments done in laboratories with

captive birds that support the idea that young birds learn to sing by

listening to older birds. These studies also taught us that birds like humans

have what's called a sensitive period early in life, a time when they are most disposed to

learn how to vocalize from their elders.

But nobody ever did one of those experiments with wild birds.

Observational studies, yes, but no true experiments. Until now, thanks to some wild Savannah Sparrows.

So this population of Savannah Sparrows lives on an island in the Bay of Fundy in Eastern North America and it's been

studied since the 1960s and so we know a lot about this population. It means we

know every kind of sound that has ever been uttered by a Savannah Sparrow in this population

over the course of many decades.

Mino and his team installed a series of loudspeakers on the island, and they played new tunes that the

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