Michele K. Moscicki

TL;DR: It is shown that information on dominance status in male black-capped chickadees, Poecile atricapillus, a small, temperate, North American songbird, can be extracted from individual songs, and suggested that non-pitch-based cues within single vocalizations can both reliably indicate relative rank and be discriminated by females.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that degree of threat corresponds to neural activity in the auditory areas and that threat can be conveyed by different species signals and that these signals must be learned.

TL;DR: It is suggested that different parental care roles in this species lead to differential perceptions of the threat of stress between the sexes.

TL;DR: The results support the hypothesis that some birds sing at higher frequencies to avoid overlap with anthropogenic noise, but suggest that vegetative structure may play a role in the modification of other song traits.

TL;DR: The results suggest that, in certain cases, neuronal activity is not higher in response to conspecific than in responded to heterospecific vocalizations for songbirds, but rather is sensitive to the acoustic features of the signal.