As a boy in England, Peter Marler was fascinated by wild birds and their songs and started a natural history club at his school. Six decades later, Marler, professor emeritus of neurobiology, physiology and behavior at UC Davis, has been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society for his work on communication in birds and primates.

Leo Chalupa, professor and chair of the Section of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior, described Marler's contributions as "stellar."

"He's the father of a large and very important field," Chalupa said. "His groundbreaking work in using the songbird as a model for learning language has had a broad influence across a wide range of fields, from neuroscience to clinical practice."

Coming from a working-class background, the young Marler did not consider an academic career. He went to University College London intending to follow a career where he could have a paying job and pursue ornithology as a hobby. After receiving his doctorate in botany from the University of London, he took a job with the Nature Conservancy, the British government agency that managed natural reserves at the time.

But Marler was still passionate about birdsong. Some songbirds show local "dialects," and Marler wanted to see if these were innate to the birds from hatching, or if -- as he suspected -- they were learned from other birds. He managed to get a fellowship at the University of Cambridge, England, to work with William (Bill) Thorpe, who had just established a field station to study birdsong.

Thorpe had just gotten access to a sonic spectrograph, a machine for visualizing and recording sound waves that was initially developed during World War II for detecting submarines.

"It was one of those stages in science where a simple piece of equipment opens up a whole new area," Marler said.

He went on to show that birds raised in the lab learned their songs from other birds -- the only example in the animal kingdom, other than humans, cetaceans and possibly bats, of cultural transmission of communications. In the process, he earned a second doctorate (zoology) from Cambridge University.

In 1957 Marler was recruited to UC Berkeley to establish the animal behavior program there. He and his wife made their way by cargo ship across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to California, complete with a large cage of hand-reared jackdaws, a type of small crow.

At Berkeley, Marler continued working on birdsong but also developed interests in monkey and ape communications, especially after meeting anthropologist and primate researcher Sherwood "Sherry" Washburn, who joined the Berkeley biology department at about the same time. They established a research center in the Berkeley Hills, and Marler spent a sabbatical in Uganda, recording the vocal repertoires of several species of forest monkey.

In 1966, the Marlers moved across the country to the newly organized Rockefeller University in New York, where he continued to work on both birds and primates.

One of his discoveries, with Tom Struhsaker, Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, was that African vervet monkeys have distinct alarm calls for different kinds of predators such as eagles or snakes. This was the first known example of an animal using symbolic communication. Marler also visited Jane Goodall's study site in Tanzania to study chimpanzee calls.

There are distinct differences between bird and primate communications, Marler said. Birdsong is purely an emotional display lacking any grammar, symbolism or anything like "words," he said. "It can be very rich but it is not symbolic in any way."

Monkeys and apes do not learn their vocalizations from each other as birds do, but they do have representative and symbolic content -- they learn how and when to use different sounds to represent different things.

Discovering how behavior and symbolic language are connected to specific brain circuits will be the dominant theme of future communications research, Marler predicted.

Marler retired from Rockefeller University in 1989 and accepted a position at UC Davis, where he helped to establish the Center for Neuroscience. He retired in 1994 but still comes to work most days: He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book, "The Neuroscience of Birdsong." One of his former graduate students, Professor John Wingfield, recently joined the faculty.

He is also a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Marler joins three other UC Davis professors who are fellows of the Royal Society: John Dewey, professor of geology; David Mayne, professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering; and Philip Power, professor of chemistry.

Founded in 1660 by King Charles II, the Royal Society is the British equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences. Past and current fellows include Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking.

A few days ago, Marler received a note from another fellow of the Royal Society, who recalled attending meetings of Marler's high school natural history club more than 60 years ago.

"I'm looking forward to seeing him," Marler said.