Mate choice hypotheses usually focus on trait variation of chosen individuals. Recently,
mate choice studies have increasingly attended to the environmental circumstances …

Highlights•Animals use social learning across a variety of ecological significant
contexts.•Evidence suggests the use of social learning depends on its adaptive utility.•Social …

We briefly review the literature on social learning in birds, concluding that strong evidence
exists mainly for predator recognition, song, mate choice and foraging. The mechanism of …

Why vocal learning has evolved in songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds but not in other
avian groups remains an unanswered question. The difficulty in providing an answer stems …

Juvenile songbirds express species-specific song discrimination from an early age, which
focuses learning onto the songs of their parental species. However, it remains unknown …

Behavioral ecology and ecology have projects in common. Community ecology can provide
behavioral ecology with the tools to ask realistic questions about the current action of natural …

Many vocalizing animals produce the discrete elements of their acoustic signals in a specific
sequential order, but we know little about the biological relevance of this ordering. For that …

Social learning of vocalizations is integral to song inheritance in oscine passerines.
However, other factors, such as genetic inheritance and the developmental environment …

In some songbird species, large song repertoires are advantageous in female attraction,
whereas song sharing with neighbours may give an advantage in male–male competition …

Species-specific sexual traits facilitate species-assortative mating by reducing mating across
species and reducing hybrid sexual attractiveness. For learned sexual traits, such as song in …