A pigment that makes feathers and hair orange helps prevent cellular damage by removing excess cysteine from cells.

Male zebra finches learn their song by imitating conspecifics. To stand out in the crowd, each male develops its own unique song. Because of this individual-specific song, it was long assumed that ...

Their first vocalizations help young zebra finch males to memorize the songs of adults. When babies learn to talk or birds learn to sing, the same principle applies: listen and then imitate. This is ...

In his home office in Durham, Duke neuroscientist Richard Mooney shows a series of images of a bird's brain on song. In one, what looks like a pointillist painting illustrates a young zebra finch's ...

In the Australian Outback, we follow Mylene Mariette as she sets up an unusual experiment that reveals something extraordinary about the zebra finches battle to survive. When it gets really hot out ...

Female zebra finches at the University of Wyoming’s Animal Behavior and Cognition Lab were subjects of a new study on bird personality. (Lisa Barrett Photo) Personality is not unique to humans. New ...

Australian zebra finches sing a rhythmic high-pitched song while incubating their eggs in a hot environment, which researchers have named a “heat call”. Experiments now show that this call influences ...

The babbling of zebra finches creates connections in the brain that enable them to memorize the song of their tutor. The picture shows a zebra finch chick (2nd from left) between a female (left) and a ...