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	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		And your bird can sing ...
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:02
	Publish Date:		2016-01-28 00:00:00
	Description:		Almost all animals with vocalizations have pretty innate ones. In other words, if a dog never met another dog, he will still bark exactly the same. But no so with birds. Hamish Mehaffey, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, studies how birds learn to sing. "In birds, if they don’t hear other birds sing, they will sing a terrible, nonsensical song that will make them very unpopular when they finally meet other birds and they usually try to mimic the songs that they hear around them. So, even within the exact same species, there are differences in the songs." Mehaffey and his colleagues have discovered the specific neurological mechanism by which songbirds can experiment and refine their songs as they become adults. "We were looking at how two different pathways interact in order to allow birds to sing; one is required for the bird to sing a normal adult song and the other one was required for any kind of changes." Understanding this mechanism in birds can help explain how the human brain learns complex motor skills and may even someday help treat neurological conditions like Parkinson’s disease.
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