Reader Ursula sent in an amazing video of a parrot imitating her friend. Now this is awesome (video quality isn’t optimal, but the sound is what counts). The backstory:
My friend Ken acquired a yellow-naped Amazon parrot, named José, from a woman who apparently spent a lot of time on the telephone. Ken discovered that when Jose is alone (he doesn’t do it when people are around), he’ll occasionally give a slam-dunk rendition of her phone persona. Ken snuck up on him to record this one-minute video:
It’s even more amazing when you realize that for some of this the bird must have had only one take before he imitated it.
And here’s lagniappe, though I have a feeling I’ve posted this before:
We had two African Grays relinquished to us several years ago from the same household. One had the husband’s voice and the other had the wife’s voice. The “wife” would constantly nag the husband and he’d answer “Ok.” The “husband” bird would do burping and farting noises and the “wife” bird would exclaim “Oh my word!” We had our own little private sitcom with these two. Ha!
Did the people you got them from know about your window into their lives?
That’s hilarious. I wonder if people have thought of giving African Grays to CIA people and then recovering the information?
To be clear, and get my friend Ken off the hook, as it were: the parrot is riffing on the phone persona of his previous owner, a woman who apparently talked non-stop in the kitchen where he lived.
Whoops, my bad. I stand corrected; I wrote this too fast!
I couldn’t make out all the words the bird was saying but the laughing was great. I was laughing along with the bird!
Same here. I couldn’t make out the words but the way she was expressing herself was obvious, and the laughing was great!
I was thinking the bird was not actually pronouncing words in a sentence, but was creating the general sound of the woman’s speech. The pattern sure sounded right. Hard to tell without a little better recording.
I think so too. Had the right sort of tone, clauses, etc. I’ll bet there were a few real phrases in there, though.
Nonetheless, a fantastic vid–& parrot!
I’m quite sure from talking to Ken that that’s the case. The woman engaged in a streams of conversation and Jose picked up on the prosody, including the laughter, and not the words themselves. Here’s a wonderful complement from one-year-old twin humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY
Oh, I saw that a long while back and forgot about it. That is priceless!
The parrot is a riot, and the laughs are so spot-on.
Amazing how the parrot captures the general speech sound and some patterns, including the laughs like a recorder of sorts. It seems for such birds it’s more important to capture that well, whereas for humans — of course — discernible words are important, and not the pitch and other characteristics. It’s a quite intriguing question what exactly is the same when two people say the same word, and what can vary. I heard that in Chinese, relative pitch is also important.
My lagniappe is a d*gs who can talk. It’s impressively demonstrated in this show (Loriot, german with english subtitles).
Ha ha! I found that pretty funny and I don’t know why. I think it was the raspberries and the German tongue twisters.
Ha, ha, both vids were wonderful!
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.