Do female birds learn faster than males? Carrie Straight 06.01.01   Some young birds go through a time when they learn and practice their songs. One scientist, Ayako Yamaguchi, wanted to learn more about this and chose Northern cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis, to use as a study species. He wanted to know if there was a difference in how fast young male and female cardinals learned to sing. He took 15 female and 11 male young northern cardinals into the laboratory. Each lived in a separate cage, and each was tutored by tape-recorded cardinal songs like they would in the nest. He systematically observed the birds as they aged and periodically recorded the practicing young cardinals. From the recordings, the researcher made spectrograms of each song. The spectrogram is a graphical representation of the song that shows each note, its length and pitch. The researcher compared the young male and female practice songs to the adult “tutor”. He discovered that female cardinals learned songs faster than the young males.   Yamaguchi, Ayako. 2000. Sex differences in vocal learning in birds. Nature 411: 257-258. ©2001 The Aurora Collection, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Site Development by: Interactive Multimedia. Inc.