WASHINGTON — Wild critters are known to listen to one another for clues about lurking predators. Birds can learn to flee when neighbors cluck “hawk!” — or, more precisely, emit a distress call.

The fairy wren, a small Australian songbird, is not born knowing the “languages” of other birds. But it can master the meaning of a few key “words,” as scientists explain in a paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

“We knew before that some animals can translate the meanings of other species’ ‘foreign languages,’ but we did not know how that ‘language learning’ came about,” said Andrew Radford, a biologist at the University of Bristol and co-author of the study.

Birds have several ways of acquiring life skills. Some knowledge is innate, and some is acquired from direct experience. Radford and other scientists are exploring a third kind of knowledge: acquiring information from peers.

Radford and colleagues at Australia National University wandered around the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra with customized “tweeter speakers” affixed to their waists, looking for solitary fairy wrens. They wanted to be certain that the birds would react only to sounds, not other birds’ behavior.

The scientists first played the birds two unfamiliar recorded sounds. One was an alarm cry of a thornbill not native to Australia. The other was a computer-generated sound dubbed “buzz.”

On first hearing these sounds, the 16 fairy wrens had no particular reaction.

The scientists then attempted to train half the birds to recognize as a warning sound the thornbill’s alarm cry, and the other half the computer-generated “buzz.” They did that by playing the unfamiliar sounds in conjunction with noises the birds already associated with danger, like fairy wrens’ distress cry.

The two sets of fairy wrens responded to the sound they had been trained on by fleeing for cover, but were indifferent to the other sound.