Bird language....

[Dr Mordrid]

at least in the North American Chickadee;

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/06/24/chickadees.reut/index.html

So much for "bird brained"

And that "mobbing" behavior they mention in the article can be quite impressive. I've seen a mob of Chickadee's chase a cat right back into the house.

Dr. Mordrid

[Helevitia]

That's pretty cool.

Speaking of birds, I walked into a building today and two birds were caught inside. One was close to me so I captured it, cut off a tangled up, dangling lint thread, and released it back outside. The second one, sadly, will probably die as it was too high to get and continued to run into window after window.

[Brian Ellis]

Many social bird species have different calls according to the what they have to tell their buddies. I'm surprised that this is considered newsworthy.

As for mobbing, I've observed that it occurs between bird species of dissimilar size, the smaller always mobbing the larger. In the last few days, I've seen swallows attacking hooded crows and kestrels and hooded crows attacking long-legged buzzards and an unidentified large raptor the size of a small eagle.

Got this photo of a Common Buzzard (buteo buteo) a couple of years back.

Edit: I attached the jpg file but the thumbnail doesn't appear for me??? The system won't allow me to re-attach it???

[TnT]

Many social bird species have different calls according to the what they have to tell their buddies. I'm surprised that this is considered newsworthy.

No one has studied the complexity of their language. Signals are obvious, but in this study they found minutely-detailed inflections that convey more meaning than people would have guessed.