Nestling birds learn socially to eavesdrop on heterospecific alarm calls through acoustic association

Animals often eavesdrop on signals intended for others to gather information about their environment. While adult animals have been shown to learn to recognize unfamiliar heterospecific alarm calls through both social and asocial learning, it remains unclear whether and how young animals learn to recognize unfamiliar alarm calls. We show experimentally that nestling Daurian redstarts Phoenicurus auroreus can socially learn to recognize unfamiliar heterospecific alarm signals by associating them with conspecific alarm calls. We trained nestlings by presenting two unfamiliar sounds, one together with conspecific alarm calls (training) and one without (control). Before training, nestlings showed similarly little response to both novel sounds. After training, however, nestlings showed clear anti-predator responses to the training sound, but not to the control sound. These results show that nestling birds can socially learn to associate novel sounds with known alarm calls, even without visua..., , , # Nestling birds learn socially to eavesdrop on heterospecific alarm calls through acoustic association

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.612jm64fj](10.5061/dryad.612jm64fj)

## Description of the data and file structure

### Files and variables

#### File: Data\_alarm.csv

##### Variables

nestid = nest identity

nesttype = type of nest (natural/box)

recording = video reocording identity

clutchsize = clutch size

group = warbler or rosefinch group

stage = test stage (Pre-training / test day 1 / test day 2)

treatment = playback treatment (warbler / rosefinch)

ifhead = whether nestlings lower the head (0 = no; 1 = yes; NA = not available, as no usable video was recorded due to reasons such as nest predation or severe weather conditions.)

ifbeg = whether nestlings emit begging call (0 = no; 1 = yes; NA = not available, as no usable video was recorded due to reasons such as nest predation or severe weather conditions.)

## Code/software

We used one R script (Rcode_alarm.R) to analyze ...,