It is common knowledge that parrots can imitate human language. Remember when Winston Churchill taught his macaw to curse Hitler? Starlings and mockingbirds have also been known to imitate the sounds they hear around them. However, ducks are commonly known to play quack. It turns out that some ducks can also learn to imitate sounds, as long as they hear them when they are still newborns. A musk duck in Australia named Ripper has become a celebrity for his ability to imitate the sound of a door closing and casually call out to someone "thirsty for blood." Ripper was bred in captivity in the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve near the Australian capital Canberra in the XNUMXs and recordings of his vocal abilities were made by now-retired Australian scientist Peter J. Fullagar. It has been theorized that the Ripper learned to say "jerk" from an old warden of the establishment. Biologist Carel ten Pruebe of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, who studies the vocal abilities of birds, came across the Ripper story and found Fullagar to make sure the stories were true. Ripper's vocal abilities, once authenticated, were the subject of a paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. According to ten Pruebe and Fullagar, the vocal abilities of birds, other than parrots and songbirds, are uncanny. . hitting single.
Largemouth Australians
The Ripper is not the only Australian bird that can imitate the sounds it hears around it. Magpies, Down Under's nightmare of spring, can imitate human speech, just like ordinary mynahs. And then there are the usual suspects in the parrot family: galahs, cockatoos, and corellas can also "chat," some of which can say things quite clearly. King parrots can be trained to imitate sounds when bred in captivity, while parakeets are also known to be talkative. The Australian lyrebird is also a great mimic, having made a name for itself in some of Sir David Attenborough's nature reporting. Lyrebirds are so skilled that they can imitate electric saws, other animals, and even human speech. Take a look at what Echo, an amazing lyrebird, can do at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, as your Livescience colleagues have reported. However, vocal learning is not exclusive to bird species. It is proven that whales, dolphins, elephants and bats are also capable of learning new sounds. But what makes Ripper unique is that there aren't many other cases where the sounds of waterfowl are mimicked. Aside from this Australian legend story, another musk duck learned to imitate the Pacific black ducks it lived with in the wild, while others, both captive-bred in the UK, could sniff like a pony, scream like a door hinge and cough like a pony. human.