Like many birds, male white-throated sparrows belt out songs to defend their territories and attract mates. And until the year 2000, one particular song stood out as the most popular white-throat tune ...

Over 20 years, scientists tracked the transformation of the traditional trill of a common bird from western Canada to Ontario. By Cara Giaimo Even if you’re not a bird person, you probably know the ...

Most birds have distinct calls that tend to stay the same. It’s how birders can recognize a species without seeing it. But new research shows these tunes can change. Over the course of two decades, ...

A new bird song is spreading like wildfire among Canadian white-throated sparrows, at a scale not seen before by scientists. Birds rarely change their chirpy little tunes, and when they do, it’s ...

Any parents out there will be familiar with the unique sort of misery that results when your kid has a new favorite song. They ask to hear it over and over, without regard for the rest of us. Well, it ...

Song remixes can be polarizing — but sometimes there's no debating that a solid remix is better than the original. This especially applies to a particular bird call that rapidly — and prior to new ...

The Outside Story features song sparrows, brown-backed birds who are the most widespread and abundant North American sparrow.

Some North American birds are changing their tune. The findings fly in the face of previous hypotheses that birdsong dialects don’t change much within local regions. The rapid spread of the new song ...

Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto. A new ...

Detective work by scientists analyzing 20 years of bird-watchers’ private audio recordings of white-throated sparrow songs revealed that a unique variant that popped up in western Canada has ‘gone ...

The birds were singing something strange. Ken Otter and Scott Ramsay first noticed it in the early 2000s, when they were recording white-throated sparrows in Prince George, a city in western Canada.