Now we know why birds sing in the spring! They are not quite in love, as we saw in cartoons when we were children, although singing is somehow related to mating. It seems that this “artistic” habit is rather related to hormones and seasonal changes than to what we could call love.

According to a new study conducted by a researcher teams from the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh and from Nagoya University in Japan, it seems that birds’ hormones are highly affected by spring and the changes this season brings along. Practically, one could say that birds’ brain is affected by seasons.

So, British and Japanese scientists discovered that cells near the pituitary gland released a hormone in the spring that was simply preparing birds for mating. Birds started to sing more often in order to attract a potential mating partner.

According to Professor Peter Sharp of the Roslin Institute, scientists haven’t known until now how exactly birds’ brain is affected by seasonal change. "Now we have identified a key element in the process of the brain's activity when spring arrives. Such knowledge would have been impossible in the past but advances in technology enabled us to scan thousands of genes so we could work out which ones are affected by seasonal change," Professor Sharp said.

Researchers used a microarray, that is a genome chip, in order to scan no less than 28,000 genes from the Japanese quail, which received different lengths of light corresponding to short, winter days and longer, spring days. Thus, researchers discovered that birds’ brain’s cells were simply switched on when they received more light.