page_title: Animal culture
section_title: Avian culture
hierarchical_section_title: Animal culture / Avian culture
context_page_description: Animal culture involves the current theory of cultural learning in non-human animals, through socially transmitted behaviors. The question as to the existence of culture in non-human societies has been a contentious subject for decades, largely due to the lack of a concise definition for the word "culture". However, many leading scientists agree on seeing culture as a process, rather than an end product. This process, most agree, involves the social transmittance of novel behaviour, both among peers and between generations. Such behaviour can be shared by a group of animals, but not necessarily between separate groups of the same species.
  The notion of culture in other animals dates back to Aristotle in classical antiquity, and more recently to Charles Darwin, but the association of other animals' actions with the actual word "culture" first originated with Japanese primatologists' discoveries of socially-transmitted food behaviours in the 1940s.
context_section_description: Birds have been a strong study subject on the topic of culture due to their observed vocal "dialects" similar to those studied in the cetaceans. These dialects were first discovered by zoologist Peter Marler, who noted the geographic variation in the songs of various songbirds. Many scientists have found that, in attempting to study these animals, they approach a stumbling block in that it is difficult to understand these animals' societies due to their being so different from our own. This makes it difficult to understand the animals' behaviors, let alone determine whether they are cultural or simply practical.
  However, despite this hindrance, evidence for differing dialects among songbird populations has been discovered, especially in sparrows, starlings, and cowbirds. In these birds, scientists have found strong evidence for imitation-based learning, one of the main types of social learning. Though the songbirds obviously learn their songs through imitating other birds, many scientists remain skeptical about the correlation between this and culture: "...the ability to imitate sound may be as reflexive and cognitively uncomplicated as the ability to breathe. It is how imitation affects and is affected by context, by ongoing social behavior, that must be studied before assuming its explanatory power." The scientists have found that simple imitation does not itself lay the ground for culture, whether in humans or birds, but rather it is how this imitation affects the social life of an individual that matters.
caption: The songs of starlings have been discovered to show regional "dialects," a trait that has potential to have a cultural basis.
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