Julie Elie is an animal behavior researcher and associate project scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. She recently won the 2026 Coller Dolittle Challenge for Two-Way Interspecies Communication for her work in studying and deciphering zebra finch communication.
In this interview, Elie discusses how zebra finches learn and use vocalizations, what their calls reveal about intelligence and social relationships and how artificial intelligence (AI) contributed to decoding birdsong.
Julie Elie: The beginning of my work with birds dates from my Ph.D. I've always been super interested in animal behavior in general. But I think as a young person, I was more attracted by animals that we relate more easily to, which are mammals, right? Dogs, cats, horses.
[Someone suggested I] work on the zebra finch, and I said, "OK, I've never taken the time to really observe birds very well; might as well start now."
So here I was, studying the zebra finch in cages where they were fully interacting with each other. And the question was, what kind of social organization do they have?
Studying birdsong can help researchers like Elie better understand how the birds navigate their complex environments. (Image credit: Nataly Studio/Shutterstock)
KHC: Why is it important to study birdsong, and what can it teach us about intelligence and behavior?
The zebra finch is a just-right middle ground level of cognitive ability that is interesting, where you see this pattern of copying vocalization and producing it. But you can look through the avian kingdom, and some species show more complex behaviors.
Parrots are also well known for that because we have them as pets, and they're able to reproduce our own vocalizations as humans. This is kind of crazy, when you think about it, because they don't have the same vocal tract as we do. It's smaller, and they have a different system. I think a high cognitive level is when an animal is able to reproduce a sound that is not in their "native language," let's say, and use it for a goal. We do see this in parrots — they're able to ask you for something or even ask the dog to shut up sometimes, which is interesting. They're able to really use those vocalizations, such as "This is not mine, but I communicate with another species this way."
KHC: Could you walk me through how you ended up decoding bird vocalizations?
It's like at home with your cat or dog: Within a couple of months, you figure out every time the cat is doing this kind of sound — "meow" — it means he wants to get out or he's hungry, or he wants to cuddle. Same thing with the dog. It's the same process, but instead of doing this with cats or dogs, I did this with birds and constituted the first acoustic dictionary of zebra finch calls.
Pet owners can often differentiate between different vocalizations in their pets, such as different meowing noises for their cat. (Image credit: Chris Winsor via Getty Images)
I thought that the best confirmation of whether I was right or not could only come from the zebra finches themselves. Up to now, nobody had found a way to systematically go through the vocal repertoire of an animal and confirm if each identified call type was indeed perceived as a word in that species' language.
The bird is placed in a cage that has a button or a little infrared sensor that it can activate with its beak. Each time it does so, the recording of a vocalization randomly drawn from the library of call types is played. Four out of five times, birds trigger the playback of a call type that will not give them access to seeds. Because they are slightly food deprived, they only really want to listen to the rewarded playback, so they interrupt the nonrewarded calls and only listen for the calls that are going to be rewarded.
The birds told us yes, basically — the organization that you're proposing is correct.
In that last case, it would mean that birds truly have an understanding of their call types' meaning. We found out that birds' errors could be better explained by the meaning [the semantic similarity] of the call types. That is a big discovery in the field of animal communication.
Julie Elie
JE: When we say "talking with birds," I think we need to understand that it's not going to be a language. Right now, I am studying the zebra finch; it doesn't mean that I would be able to communicate with a crow once I have a repertoire. So there's this component of when we talk about birds, there are many different species.
For now, I found all those words. But we need to understand how those words are [strung] together. So it's not necessarily the case that we need to understand the rules of the dynamic exchanges between individuals or how fast you're responding, but how you are responding and whether that makes sense or not.
It's not tomorrow for sure, it's probably not next year, but I think in the range of 10 years we should get there. Especially with how fast the domains of AI and robotics are. I have some hope that we should be able to get to that point.
Exclusive to Live Science ProKHC: Is there one takeaway you would want our readers to know about your work?
This is a lesson to us as another species on this planet, that we are not the only ones that are smart and we need to take this into account in how we are evolving.
Editor's note: Some of this interview was conducted via email as part of a follow-up conversation. The interview has been edited lightly for clarity and length.
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