Birds sing to be heard, but how do they cope with increasing noise levels? Which species persist in cities and why? And do they thrive or suffer in the urban soundscape?

IBL-researcher Katharina Riebel, together with international collaborators, published a remarkable finding in Nature Communications on the prevalence of female birdsong.

Last week Audubon published an article about the lack of female birdsong recordings and the community sourced project that is tackeling this skew.

Vocal learning is a trait shared by songbirds and humans. It is also a trait that is restricted by the brain rather than by a species' vocal apparatus. In this dissertation, functional MRI is employed in both species in order to explore potential common neural mechanisms underlying the ability to develop…

It may well be that only male zebra finches can sing, but the females are faster at learning to discriminate sounds. Leiden researchers publish their findings in the scientific journal Animal Behaviour.

Can Zebra finches learn to distinguish two very similar Dutch words? Research by behavioral biologist Verena Ohms proved that they can identify 'wit' and 'wet'. Ohms published her findings in "Proceedings of the Royal Society B '.

An international research team consisting of Katharina Riebel as leading PI and two international collaborators were awarded a Human Frontier Science Program grant for their proposal ‘Seeing voices’: the role of multimodal cues in vocal learning.

Can birds - like people- ‘see’ voices and learn how to sing by listening and watching?

We perform multidisciplinary research at molecular, cellular, and organismal levels of animal biology to increase fundamental understanding of health and disease.

Listening to birds and helping science, it is possible. Institute of Biology Leiden (IBL) researchers Karan Odom and Katharina Riebel launched a citizen science project to improve the worldwide documentation of female birdsong.

Herman Berkhoudt (former employee of the IBL, then EEW) organized the course, while Merijn de Bakker and Hans Slabbekoorn spoke about the latest insights in their disciplines.

For a long time, bird song was considered as a typical male trait. But over the last twenty years, research has shown that a lot of female songbirds sing as well. Female scientists turned out to be the key factor in these findings, amongst others from the Institute of Biology Leiden.

What is the situation like in South Africa in these times of corona? Leiden Alumna Josine Overdevest (Law, 1986) immigrated to South Africa in 2003 attracted to the dynamics of a country filled with contradictions and a wonderful diversity. She is now living in the inner city of Johannesburg,

A study in the Behavioral Biology group of Carel ten Cate at the IBL showed that experience-dependent and -independent preferences influence song learning in zebra finches.

How can we organise society so as to keep our planet habitable for us and for all other life forms around us? To answer this question, Leiden researchers collaborate across disciplines, from biology to data science, and from environmental economy to archaeology.

Lecture

Birds around airports are more aggressive and sing as if they have hearing loss. Collaboration between researchers of Manchester Metropolitan University and the Institute of Biology Leiden has led to surprising new findings about the impact of anthropogenic noise on birds around airports. Publication…