Scientists discover birds of a feather fail to speak together

Communication is important to maintain social order among animals.

People are certainly the most talkative of animals, with a spoken vocabulary of more than 40,000 words, but we are not the only creatures which can talk.

Many species have their own language and use it to call their young, warn others of danger or attract a mate.

Although they may sound the same to us, not all lions or jungle fowl roar or cackle exactly alike.

Just as there are differences in the rendering, pitch and style in the various human languages and dialects, so there are in animal languages.

Crows in Pennsylvania understand and respond correctly to the calls of other Pennsylvanian crows. When they heard tape-re corded calls of their cousins from other parts of the United States they responded wrongly, assembling instead of flying off in the alarm.

However, this is not always the case: migrant crows in the US have learned to understand 'foreigners' and are multilingual. Researchers have listed at least 300 different 'words' used by crows but unfortunately no one knows what most of them mean.