Dr. Mark Hauber's Work on Songbird's 'Vocal Password' Featured in Forbes Magazine

Dr. Mark Hauber's work on finding a possible 'behavioral mechanism' for species recognition in parasitic cowbirds was discussed in an article in Forbes magazine recently  https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2017/05/11/cowbirds-secret-identity-is-unlocked-by-a-vocal-password/#71e999123ce3 . While still a graduate student, Hauber (now a professor in the Psychology Department at Hunter, and Interim Vice-Provost for Research at CUNY) conducted a study that found that "adults, fledglings and even nestlings as young as six days old respond strongly and preferentially to the brown-headed cowbird chatter call, and [that] this call may act as a 'vocal password' that triggers species recognition." Professor Hauber notes that "after our discovery of the password as a behavioral mechanism in parasitic cowbirds over 15 years ago as a graduate student, it is rewarding for me to be working on an NSF [National Science Foundation] grant to identify the neural basis of this behavior as a professor."