Do Birds Have Ears? (Everything Explained)

Birdsong is one of the richest and most inspiring sounds in nature. While not all birds sing, all birds make sounds, and many are capable of complex sounds. If a bird can sing, it must be able to listen. Do birds have ears?

Birds do have ears, but they’re constructed differently than humans and other mammals. Bird ears are similar to lizard ears – they are tunnel-like openings behind the eyes and are protected by feathery flaps of skin called pinnae. Ear cups help transmit sound to the ears while protecting them from solid particles and air turbulence while flying.

Bird song and bird hearing fascinated biologist and naturalist Charles Darwin, who observed the many ways in which birds use complex vocalizations as a melodic language.

Despite having no visibly visible ears, birds have highly developed hearing and have an interesting evolutionary history; read on to discover more facts about bird ears and related topics!

Birds Do Have Ears, But They’re Invisible

Do birds have good hearing?

Although birds do not have the complex outer ears of mammals, their ears are well developed.

The audible frequency range of birds is about 100Hz to 14,000Hz, which is slightly narrower than that of humans. Humans can hear sounds as low as 20Hz, which are low bass notes or distant thunder, and up to 20,000Hz, which are extremely high-pitched sounds, similar to the highest notes playable on a violin. Despite their narrow hearing range, some experiments have found that birds can detect infrasound, which is a frequency recorded below 20 Hz. It’s unclear whether the birds hear the infrasound through their ears or detect it by some other means.

Bird hearing is also generally less sensitive than that of mammals, but is sensitive in the 1kHz to 4kHz range, and there are some interesting adaptations that give birds hearing an edge over many other animals. One such feature of bird ears is that despite not having the outer ear (pinna) that mammals have, they are still good at pinpointing the exact location of sounds.

The researchers believe that the structure of the entire head helps birds determine sounds, as well as their ability to accurately distinguish between different pitches.

A pair of swallows communicating with each other

Which birds have the best hearing?

Birds with exceptional hearing include owls, which rely on their excellent eyesight and hearing to hunt prey in the dark of night.

Some owls have misaligned or asymmetrical ears, which allow them to locate sounds more accurately than humans. This misalignment creates a time delay between one ear and the other, helping them decode where even the quietest noises are coming from.

The faces of some owls, such as northern owls and barn owls, look a bit like radar antennas—they’re designed to “catch” sound and filter it into their ears. They can even adjust the position of this “radar antenna” using facial muscles. In addition to excellent eyesight, owls have some of the finest and most adaptable senses in the animal kingdom.

Barn owls have excellent hearing

Can birds hear ultrasound?

No bird has been shown to hear ultrasound. In fact, the ears of birds are not particularly sensitive to high frequencies, and the audible frequency range is narrower than that of humans.

There are some animals that can hear ultrasound accurately, such as bats and dolphins, but this is not common. Insects are also good at hearing ultrasonic waves and sensing ultrasonic vibrations.

What do you call bird ears?

Bird ears don’t have specific names. The structure differs from mammalian ears in that there is no outer ear structure, called the pinna. However, they still have outer, middle and inner ears. The outer ear is just a tube that leads to the eardrum.

A bird’s ears are protected by the pinna, a complex set of feathers that help protect the ear from air turbulence and particles, and help channel sound from the bird’s head into the ear.

Don’t confuse these with the ear tufts that protrude from the great horned owl’s head. Although they look like ears, they have nothing to do with hearing, but are used for camouflage and communication.

Great horned owls look as if they have ears on top of their heads, but they are just ear tufts rather than ears.

Do birds like music?

Birdsong is no different from human music and has inspired countless pieces of music as well as poetry, books and art.

Some birds are indeed super musical and love to sing – a single songbird may sing 1,000 to 2,500 times a day! The parrots are often seen on social media, bouncing around, dancing and nodding to the music – and they certainly look happy.

So birds certainly look like musical animals, but do they really like music?

Birds are good listeners, and they seem to understand music, research shows. After all, bird songs have musical properties such as pitch, pitch, timbre, and rhythm that are very similar to human music. There is some evidence in support of birds understanding music; a famous 1984 study found that pigeons could tell the difference between Bach and Stravinsky, and in 2012, researchers found that birds have auditory brain structures similar to those of humans, meaning they may be able to Understand the same characteristics of music as we do. Further experiments also found that birds share some complex brain structures with humans, despite our common ancestor being about 320 million years old.

Perhaps most intriguingly, the researchers discovered that birds enjoy bird songs in a similar way to the way humans enjoy our own music. This suggests that birds don’t just sing for courtship, territory marking and communication, but simply because they enjoy singing.

notorious singer euro robin

If you think about it, few other creatures in the animal kingdom are capable of producing advanced melodic sounds like birds and humans. Other animals also have voices, but they don’t possess the same level of complex musical features such as timbre, rhythm, pitch and pitch.

The short answer is yes, some birds seem to “like” music as much as we do, and they may sing complex songs not just for courtship, mating, and communication, but simply because they enjoy them. Humans and birds are not that different when it comes to music!

Why do birds sing?

Birds of all kinds are singing. Some, like sedge warblers and brown thrushes, have thousands of songs in their repertoires.

The musical nature of birdsong fascinated Darwin and is documented in Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and On the Origin of Species (1859). His theory is that bird song evolved to help birds communicate and survive, but the fact that it evolved in such a complex way has baffled scientists to this day.

We now know that Darwin was pretty accurate. First, birdsong is a way of attracting a mate, and some birds are chosen because their songs are better than others. Birds also sing to announce their presence within their territories. As mentioned earlier, birds don’t need a reason to sing at all – they sing because they love to, like anyone who can sing like a songbird!

Brown Thrashers Can Write Thousands of Songs

Can birds hear bugs?

Some foraging birds, such as robins and blackbirds, are known to detect moving invertebrates underground before they actually see them. They also probe the ground with their beaks, which help them detect vibrations beneath the soil.

Birds’ hearing is usually most sensitive at close range, which is why birds have to be very close to the ground to hear these sounds – the sound of earthworms moving through the soil is very quiet after all.

Can birds understand human voices?

There is some evidence that birds can recognize and identify humans by their voice and appearance. Once they have become familiar with a person’s voice, some birds can distinguish that person from others they don’t know.

While many birds in the class songbirds and parrots are very good at imitating human speech and will learn and repeat phrases spoken to them, some birds, such as starlings, can actually create new sentences of their own based on the words and phrases they learn. In a sense, then, they can be taught to speak in a similar way to humans, even though they may lack any conceptual understanding of what the words actually mean.

Even birds that cannot imitate other sounds have complex calls and ways of communicating. Bird communication is the most complex of all animal communication, the result of continuous evolution over thousands of years. Bird song, mimicry, and bird communication still fascinate researchers today, and there’s still much to learn.

The sedge warbler is a very talking bird

Can you see the bird’s ears?

A bird’s ears are hidden by protective feathers called pinnae. These not only protect the ears from dust and other particles, but also prevent air turbulence when birds are in flight. If the pinna is pulled back, the bird’s ear looks like a hole or tunnel. They don’t have outer ears like humans, so imagine a human ear without the outer ear components – you’ll just be left with a hole!