Birds 'talk' to other species during migration

Scientists discovered last year that birds 'buddy up' with others at stopover sites while migrating and it has now been found that they even chat to each other to find out important information about their journey.

A team at the University of Illinois studied over 18,000 hours of recorded flight calls over a period of three years in eastern North America and used artificial intelligence to detect the signature sound of 27 species.

This allowed them to measure how certain calls happened at the same time and revealed that different species seem to 'talk' as they fly.

Benjamin Van Doren, lead author of the research, said: "We can't be sure what they're saying, but birds might broadcast calls during flight to signal their species, age, and sex."

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