Am I the only one wondering what the National Institutes of Health has to do with ornithological research? Isn't this a little outside their mandated field?
This work was done with a combination of funding from the US national science foundation and Japan's JSPS (see acknowledgements) and doesn't involve the NIH directly. PubMed/PMC are hosted there, though.
That said, animal models are extremely common for NIH-funded work, and birds feature prominently in studies of language and auditory processing.
