The dark-eyed junco (*Junco hyemalis*) has experienced rapid phenotypic diversification within the last 18,000 years, resulting in several subspecies that reside in partially overlapping regions across North America. These subspecies have distinct …
Oscine songbirds have been an important study system for social learning, particularly because their learned songs provide an analog for human languages and music. Here, we propose a different analogy: from an evolutionary perspective, could birds’ …
Oscine songbirds are an ideal system for investigating how early experience affects vocal behavior. Young songbirds face a challenging task: how to recognize and selectively learn only their own species’ song, often during a time-limited window. …
Premating isolation in animals involves decision-making processes that affect whether individuals accept or reject heterospecific mates. An integrative understanding of the behavioural processes underlying heterospecific acceptance can clarify the …
Understanding the causes and consequences of divergence in mate recognition traits has long been a fundamental question in evolutionary biology. In songbirds, songs are culturally transmitted, and cultural divergence can generate discrete geographic …
Many songbird species have a predisposition to learn conspecific songs, suggesting song learning may be guided by an innate auditory template. Evidence for such a template includes preferential response to conspecific song in early life, even before …
Sexual selection has been widely implicated as a driver of speciation. However, allopatric forms are often defined as species based on divergence in sexually selected traits and it is unclear how much such trait differences affect reproductive …