Young birdlings learn their songs by listening to the adults sing, but can they be taught new music? Research published by Current Biology shows that they can, and that the new songs are then passed on to the next generation. https://phys.org/news/2018-10-wild-birds-tune.html

""I was quite shocked that our loudspeakers succeeded in teaching wild birds to sing," says Dan Mennill (@DMennill) from the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. "The sparrows in our island-living population had abundant opportunities to learn songs from live tutors, and yet thirty birds learned songs from the loudspeakers, providing experimental evidence of vocal learning."

Conventional experiments of vocal learning in birds have been conducted in the laboratory. But such studies are much more difficult to do in the wild. The researchers overcame the challenges in the new study by focusing their attention on Savannah Sparrows living at Bowdoin Scientific Station on Kent Island. The sparrows on this island often return to the place of their birth to breed as adults. That made it possible for researchers to expose young birds to novel songs and then record those same animals when they returned from migration to breed the next year.

Mennill's team, including researchers from the University of Windsor, University of Guelph, and Williams College, developed a new type of loudspeaker that is programmable, solar powered, light activated, and weatherproof. The speakers allowed them to broadcast adult songs with distinctive acoustic signatures for the wild sparrows over tutoring sessions that lasted for months. Over a six-year period between 2013 and 2018, they experimentally tutored five cohorts of Savannah Sparrows, from the time they hatched to adulthood."

Quite splendid if I do say so myself, fellow smart fellows.