A recurrent theme in much of our work, both on birds and on mammals, is vocal learning in its broadest sense. We have studied how animals modify the sounds that they produce through learning, for example chaffinches in the wild and zebra finches, budgerigars and grey seals in captivity. We have also studied how animals learn about sounds, such as hornbills and harbour seals learning to recognise and avoid sounds that indicate the presence of predators. A recurrent theme in all this work is to try to understand the capacities that have evolved and why. Particularly when it comes to copying sounds from other individuals (so called production learning), this capacity has a very patchy distribution in birds and mammals, providing an interesting challenge to understanding.
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