Does beer make you shlur your wordsh? You're not alone: drunk zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) sing songs that are blurrier and more disordered than those of their sober counterparts. 
 
 What's more, binge drinking may permanently impair juvenile finches' ability to learn new songs – which could have implications for our understanding of the effect of heavy drinking on adolescents. 
 
 Having a unique and interesting song is important for zebra finches to mate, and each male develops his own signature tune as he matures, says Christopher Olson of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. 
 
 Because zebra finch song is so well studied, Olson and colleagues decided to find out how alcohol would affect it. First, they had to find out whether finches are even interested in alcohol. 
 
 When they gave a group of adult finches 6 per cent ethanol in their water bottles, the birds drank enough of it that their blood alcohol content sometimes reached 0.8 per cent: the legal limit for drivers in many places. 
 
 Husky bar voice 
 
 The birds were also happy to sing while drunk. Using audio analysis software, the researchers determined the degree of "white noise", or disorganised sounds, in their songs. The drunk birds' songs were significantly more broken and disorganised. "It's their husky bar voice," says Olson. 
 
 Next, the researchers tested how alcohol affects song learning by putting 3 per cent ethanol in the water bottles of birds who were only 40 days old and had just been weaned. They left the spiked water there for 90 days and measured the birds' songs periodically. 
 
 Almost immediately, significant differences appeared between these birds and controls. Normally, Olson says, young birds "babble" and experiment with disordered noises before settling on their own song, which is inspired by their fathers and cagemates . 
 
 But the drinking finches experimented less, and settled on a simple song at day 55. 
 
 It's surprising how early the researchers could see the effects in the adolescent birds, says Ofer Tchernichovski at the City University of New York. He says it is the first study of the effects of a drug on such a well-understood learned behaviour, and adds that he is curious to know what happens when the alcohol is withdrawn. 
 
 The researchers hypothesise that alcohol might be suppressing the young birds' creativity by hurting the plasticity, or flexibility of their brains to learn. In general, finches are no longer able to learn new songs as adults, Olson says, so the effects could be long-term. They are now following these birds for longer to determine whether adult birds become dependent on alcohol, and whether the young birds' songs develop any further if alcohol is withdrawn. 
 
 Olson presented the results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, this week. He says the work may also tell us something about how learning behaviour in the adolescent human brain is affected by binge drinking. 
 
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 Enlarge this image toggle caption Liza Gross/Courtesy Public Library of Science Liza Gross/Courtesy Public Library of Science 
 
 If you've ever listened to karaoke at a bar, you know that drinking can affect how well someone can sing. Christopher Olson and his colleagues at Oregon Health and Science University recently set out to find if the same was true for birds, specifically zebra finches. 
 
 "We just showed up in the morning and mixed a little bit of juice with 6 percent alcohol, and put it in their water bottles and put it in the cages," Olson told All Things Considered's Arun Rath. "At first we were thinking that they wouldn't drink on their own because, you know, a lot of animals just won't touch the stuff. But they seem to tolerate it pretty well and be somewhat willing to consume it." 
 
 The finches long have been used as a model to study human vocal learning, or how people learn to communicate using language, Olson said. Obviously, alcohol affects human speech, so Olson and his team checked for similar problems with the birds. 
 
 The blood alcohol levels achieved — .05 to .08 percent — would be laughed off by many college students, but because birds metabolize alcohol differently it was plenty to produce the effects the scientists were looking for. 
 
 Listen to the audio, and you'll hear that the finches' song gets a bit quieter and just a little slurred, or as Olson puts it, "a bit less organized in their sound production" — like a roommate calling from a bar to get a ride home. 
 
 In the future, Olson wants to find out whether alcohol affects not just how birds sing but how they learn new songs — like a roommate partying so late he's still drunk in class the next morning.
– Not many people count getting zebra finches drunk as their job. But researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University did just that to study how alcohol affects the birds' ability to sing—and to learn more about how it affects the human brain, Smithsonian reports. Birds are a great case study for how people use language, and zebra finches in particular are well suited, adds New Scientist. Each male zebra finch has a signature tune, which helps them in the mating game. "We just showed up in the morning and mixed a little bit of juice with 6% alcohol, and put it in their water bottles … They seem(ed) to tolerate it pretty well and be somewhat willing to consume it," researcher Christopher Olson tells NPR. Researchers found the birds loved to sing while drunk—at a BAC of .05% to .08%—but didn't do so well. Their songs were "slurred, quieter ... and disorganized," adds Smithsonian. Olson calls it their "husky bar voice." What most interested researchers was the effect alcohol had on adolescent birds. Month-old birds got 3% ethanol in their water bottles for 90 days and researchers immediately saw the effects. Zebra finches tend to test out different tunes before settling on their own, but birds who drank gave up after only 55 days of trying and opted for a simple tune, New Scientist adds. Researchers think alcohol damaged their brains' ability to learn. And the effect was permanent—adult birds can't learn new songs. Researchers say this could reveal the effect of binge drinking on teenagers. (Songbirds can tell when a tornado is coming.)