Drunk Birds will Slur While Singing, Study Finds

Humans are not the only species that will slur when they get drunk. According to a new study, researchers found that birds will have trouble singing if they are inebriated.

In this study, the researchers at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland tested the effects of alcohol on zebra finches. These birds learn how to sing in a similar way that humans learn how to speak. The team wanted to examine how alcohol affects the parts of the brain linked to speech.

The researchers gave half the birds spiked juice until their blood ethanol content levels have risen to 0.05 percent to 0.08 percent and the other half was given grape juice.

"We just showed up in the morning and mixed a little bit of juice with 6 percent alcohol, and put it in their water bottles and put it in the cages," Christopher Olson, a researcher at the university, told NPR. "At first we were thinking that they wouldn't drink on their own because, you know, a lot of animals just won't touch the stuff. But they seem to tolerate it pretty well and be somewhat willing to consume it."

The researchers found that the drunk birds could not sing a tune without slurring.

The researchers wrote, "The strongest effects of alcohol on song were on amplitude and entropy, detectable over whole motifs and at the individual syllable level. The effect on entropy, in particular, indicates a destabilizing effect of alcohol on song production, disrupting a bird's ability to maintain its normal acoustic structure of song and its component syllables."

The study was published in the journal, PLOS One.