Zebra finch couples establish a private communication channel
Lisa Gill, Pietro D’Amelio, Nico Adreani, Lisa Trost, Andries Ter Maat
When kept in a group, zebra finch males and females will form breeding pairs. Pair bonding takes place in justa few days. The developing pattern of antiphonal calling is an indicator for this process. Individuals of a pair use certain call types to exchange information with the partner (Ter Maat et al., 2014).
The zebra finch repertoire consists of about seven different call types, three of them are associative and used in a regular social context. By getting into breeding conditions, other call types come into play. So zebra finches are able to communicate in a context dependent way. (Gill et al., 2015; D'Amelio et al., 2017b)