Babbler birds do more than babble – they appear to communicate like humans, scientists have revealed.

The chestnut-crowned babbler, from Australia, rearranges apparently random sounds to produce calls that convey meaning, researchers found.

Such an ability was previously thought to be a uniquely human skill.

Lead scientist Sabrina Engesser, from the University of Zurich in Switzerland, said: “Although previous studies indicate that animals, particularly birds, are capable of stringing different sounds together as part of a complex song, these songs generally lack a specific meaning and changing the arrangement of sounds within a song does not seem to alter its overall message.

“In contrast to most songbirds, chestnut-crowned babblers do not sing. Instead its extensive vocal repertoire is characterised by discrete calls made up of smaller acoustically distinct individual sounds.”

The findings, published in the online journal Public Library of Science Biology, are said to shed light on the early evolution of language.

Babblers were shown to combine two sounds – classified as A and B – to generate code-calls associated with specific behaviours.

In flight the birds produced an ‘AB’ call, but when feeding chicks in the nest the sound they made was ‘BAB’.

When the sounds were played back, listening birds seemed to understand what they meant. Birds looked at nests when they heard a feeding prompt call, and scanned the sky for incoming birds when they heard a flight call.