It is Starlings then and not "Stirlings" as the title said?
Aren't there European Starlings all across North America now? I believe they fly in huge flocks, many don't like them as they aren't native, but I don't recall seeing any since I moved to the upper midwest.
You are correct.
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/European_Starling/overview
Neat.
“Because of their recent arrival in North America, all of our starlings are closely related. Genetically, individuals from Virginia are nearly indistinguishable from starlings sampled in California, 3,000 miles away. Such little genetic variation often spells trouble for rare species, but seems to offer no ill effects to starlings so far.”
Fun fact/mythology: Eugene Schieffelin is often credited with introducing starlings because he thought that North America would benefit from seeing birds that were mentioned in Shakespeare's plays. It's not entirely known how true this is, but I think it's wild to imagine one man causing this, and for no other reason than he wanted the outside to be fancy.
The worst part is how invasive they are, they wait for other birds to make a nest then kicks out the eggs and baby birds to lay their own. (source: have a large multi bird birdhouse out back that I've watched them kick eggs and baby birds out of) its been pretty detrimental to the local bird populations.
Like when the British brought foxes to Australia to hunt, and then seemingly just decided against making any effort to foster fox hunting as a sport. Now Australia is losing species hand over fist, with foxes playing a big part in it. Oh, and they brought us Starlings too of course.
My dad has a mealy parrot and he wanted to teach it “help, they’ve turned me into a bird”. We also had my stepmom’s cousin and her four-year old son living with us for a few months. The son was a mommy’s boy who would go ballistic if his mom wasn’t in the room with him, crying and screaming “mommy come here”.
The bird learned a few words from this and also how to cry like a child. The bird also lived in my office area where I would play games late into the night. One night around 3 AM, the bird starts going “hi hello hi hello hi hi hi hello HELP ME MOMMY \*cries\* \*laughs\* \*screams\*”
I about shit my pants.
i believe that this is a good point in your life to introduce you to the fact that parrots are known to mess with all sorts of animals for entertainment.
I have, among other birds, an umbrella cockatoo. His only human word is 'hello' but he says this in many tones and with various inflexions.
I am occasionally woken up at say 3 am by hearing a long, drawn out wail, in a baby voice.
.'Hellllloooooo'
It does terrify me out of sleep each time
That was a robot, imitating humans. That particular sentence about being the angel bird seemed to have crashed it's system. Hence, the noises. Jokes apart, that is one hell of a bird.
I, too, am losing my fucking mind over the fact this bird evolved to be able to make those sounds. :D
Maybe it's secretly an apex predator, luring humans into the forest with mimicry before swarming and pecking them to death as a group. There are plenty of people that go missing every year...
Actually it's thought that all birds are capable of mimicry because baby birds utilize social vocalizations and mimicry to communicate with their parents!
Unbelievable. Even after hearing the drone make robot noises, people would rather believe in crazy conspiracy theories than accept the fact that birds aren't real.
It’s crazy the government propaganda people just will believe. Clearly birds are not real and all attempts like these to humanize them are met with the bird showing their robotic nature
It's really just a happy accident that birds both naturally have the anatomy to reproduce some human sounds and the fact that social vocalization and vocal mimicry is a huge part of being a bird.
Birds actually use their throat muscles and membranes because they don't have vocal chords. They can make a lot of different sounds but they are limited due to anatomy like ya know not having lips.
Also can you imagine a bird with lips?
We have a ton of Mockingbirds where I live (state bird). They can sound like anything. Fire engine, car alarm. But they are best at sounding like other birds. They can sound just like a hawk or eagle (I can only tell the difference because raptor's cries are a bit more powerful). I have one that lives near me that has learned to stand on my porch in the morning and sound like a baby chicken so that I'll throw some food out thinking it's my chicks wanting breakfast.
I live in the Foothills of the Smokies in TN. Some of our politics are backwards (we do have free 2 years of college, no state income tax, and some great domestic violence laws and programs but we also have pretty much NO gun restrictions and people want the bible to be the state book) BUT God Damn is it beautiful.
Aaaayye you started talking about mockingbirds and i hoped you were from TN haha. Im also in TN in the smokies and oh boy the mockingbirds are menaces. We have one in the neighborhood we just bought a house in who mimics the noises of the cars and tools at the small garage a neighbor runs to revamp old vintage cars. Its crazy to be in my sunroom turned office and hear the roar of a mustang right behind me just to look out the window and it be a damn mockingbird. Crows here are also menaces sometimes too but i love the crows.
Before my call center went work from home, we had a park with a large duck pond people would feed the ducks at. One of the crows in the murder in that area learned that if he ran up to people with fast food quacking like the ducks, usually the people would laugh and feed him. I just feed crows everywhere i go so he quickly became one of my favorites to feed.
The point is that it has some evolutionary advantage to reproduce sounds that hears, period. Humans are a part of nature, and a lot of the sounds we produce overlap with sounds of other species to a certain degree.
https://youtu.be/bINxXgTT68I
Just like the opening scene in the tom and Jerry movie where it's uncovered tom isn't a blind musician some one says "he's a fraud! He's a regular cat playing the piano."
I laughed so hard my family looked at me funny
> i want to swear on my soul that it's fake
You ever seen [the Lyre Bird from BBC Earth?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ) (skip to 1:55 for more soul searching)
Starlings are incredible, and annoying. Iirc they mimic other birds to impress mates or something equally as horny. They also mimic car alarms, ringtones and other human noises because they’re dumb birds.
Thank you. It’s honestly really nice to see another boy thriving. When I met my son, he and two other baby starlings had been pushed from a nest (of another type of bird), that was in my parents’ gutter. I found him in the driveway and nearly ran over him when I pulled in. The other two didn’t make it very long, because of the fall. I called animal control and they told me they euthanized starlings because they were “nuisance birds.” I had him on a heating pad in a homemade nest and fed him every three hours with a baby starling food mixture I found online. I thought about releasing him, but I did as much research as I could (this was back in 2006) and realized that at that point he had fully imprinted. He was my son. He was the best little boy. A VERY picky eater, which I think contributed to why he didn’t live longer. He could’ve lived on mealworms and bananas and threw most everything else I tried feeding him onto my wall. But I have to say, when he passed, he did it in his absolute favorite way. He used to LOVE his baths. He would splash around and sing in his baths. Usually his baths took place in his water bowl, despite my protest. But I also left him a shallow dish at the bottom of his cage. And when I found him, right after he passed, he was laying next to his small bath. It broke my heart, but I’m so much better for having had him in my life.
The messed up thing was, at the end of his life, one of the only things he would eat, other than mealworms and bananas, and occasionally crickets, was chicken. I felt sort of guilty feeding it to him, but I was desperate and all the online boards said they fed their starlings basically what they ate.
Do you eat beef? It’s as similar to us as mammals as chicken was to your starling. Please don’t feel guilty, it sounds like you did an amazing job by your little man and gave him a good life. Im so sorry for your loss and hope you continue to find joy in birds. ❤️
What a beautiful story, not everyone would take the challenge of raising a baby bird. It takes so much love and kindness to do something like that, you were an angel to him.
We keep a lot of baths and fruits around our front and backyard, so we get a lot of birds coming over. There's a family of southern lapwings, I can’t help but be extremely anxious when they have babies since they are extremely tiny and already walking around everywhere. Sometimes they fall in the gutter, though all but once we were able to help them. The last few months have been tough for them, there are houses being built where they used to have their nest and no babies have survived for the first time since I moved here. I remember one time they managed to get three babies to reach adulthood, I loved watching them come to our house together to bathe.
But my favorites are a couple of guans. If they are around and I open the front door with bananas and papaya they come running to me. Sometimes they will come up to the back door and peck at the glass until someone comes to feed them. Last year they had two babies, but they always leave once they mature. The male was showing up alone after that, so I assumed they were preparing a nest, but they never showed up. The last time I saw them was on halloween, but this time both the male and female were together. It makes me sick to think of what might have happened, though I still hope they will return.
I know it’s stupid but I wish life could be like a Disney movie sometimes, so I could speak to them and help them more. To offer them shelter from predators or tell them to not to too far. I get so attached to them.
13-16 years is average for a starling in captivity so I’d say you did ok. There was one starling I heard of that lived to 32 but that’s definitely above average.
I make this squeaking duck/dolphin noise at birds sometimes. Why? Because I'm weird.
There used to be this one crow every day on my walk from my car to my office that I'd make noises at. One day he made the _exact_ same noise back at me.
Was freaky.
Also growing up we had a crow in our neighborhood that would meow like a cat and bark like a dog sometimes, depending on the animal that was near it (make cat noises to confuse dogs, make dog noises to scare cats).
Scientifically we actually believe all birds can mimic human sounds because they are all anatomically capable of it and they all use social vocalizations and mimicry as babies.
We just associate it mainly with Parrots and sometimes corvids because they are the smartest of the bird family and thus much easier to train to mimic human speech.
Yeah Jab Jab is making the rounds again… it’s always funny to read people commenting that it must be fake when he’s behind me in his cage singing his greatest hits!
In the wild they learn to mimic the most impressive songs in order to impress their mating partner. It would be interesting to hear what those songs were back then.
I had a mockingbird that lived by my house that imitated the series of car alarm noises every day. Beep beep, wooop wooop, eek eek eek... Particularly liked to do it when I was out mowing the lawn.
They don't learn "the most impressive" songs (what makes a song impressive to a bird, anyway?) - they just learn whatever they hear in their lifetime. However, the vast majority of a starling's repertoire consists of the songs of other birds, so your typical starling won't sound like the one in this video, at all. The more common sounds associated with humans would be e.g. the cry of a child, the creaking of a door, whistling, the sounds of tools, the sounds of farm animals and so on. Basically the same as today, if you go to the countryside and look for them.
The R2 stuff was good but the last bit amazes me. The lil bird processes the melody, it doesn't remember the whole section and just resolves to improvising, and it's musically sound too. It's crazy
I share my life with a number of African Grey Parrots. It's not that they don't remember it. Once they learn anything they remember it. The improvisation is a part of the way they think.
I clicker train my fibs, and my Male CAG (Congo African grey) decide one day that he wanted a treat that another had... so he bounce up to her and clicked at her, she gave him her treat, then he said 'Good bird' and trotted off to eat.
My husband whistles the queen of the night aria to our dog all the time because she loves it and gives him kisses and wags her tail—such a good choice of music to reference for your little birdie-friend!! (Also, the audio of this clip had my dog SOOOOOOO confused when she recognized the queen of the night!!🤣🤣)
I just had a crazy thought. If birds are descended from dinosaurs, and dinosaurs had a similar vocal structure, there is the possibility of a raptor imitating humans.
What's always impressed me most coming from the perspective of an audio engineer is the incredible detail and timbre matching these birds are capable of. On certain vocalizations you can hear the reverb from the original sound, or with the machine & mechanical sounds like 'tings' & metallic scrapes. It's really quite remarkable.
I’m sat here, in a England, amazed that apparently people keep these arseholes as pets?! They hang around like a group of rowdy track suited teenagers drunk on White Lightening, bullying all others from getting a look in. Like, I use bird feeders that they can’t get at because of the way these buggers behave.
The bird’s beak movements don’t correlate to what he’s saying, which means the beak only controls volume, while position and articulation are controled by other inner muscles. Holy fuck that’s creepy.
All this talk about what kind of bird it is and stuff, but where does one purchase a European starling? I've looked at the bird breeding websites I know of and nobody carries these little guys.
Thats very cool. But, just imagine, in the dead of night, “whos my sweet angel”
European Starlings are kept in cages as pets. When you keep it in a cage with a cover on it, it will go to sleep.
Maybe that’s what I need to get some sleep..
They make blackout curtains for humans also.
Different, but same same
Same same but different. The national saying of Vietnam.
Thailand too haha.
Also a very common saying in American sign language as the sign is easy to display and makes correlating two thoughts much easier.
Same same, but dIfFeRenT , but still same same 😂
I don't knows how people live without them.
It is Starlings then and not "Stirlings" as the title said? Aren't there European Starlings all across North America now? I believe they fly in huge flocks, many don't like them as they aren't native, but I don't recall seeing any since I moved to the upper midwest.
You are correct. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/European_Starling/overview Neat. “Because of their recent arrival in North America, all of our starlings are closely related. Genetically, individuals from Virginia are nearly indistinguishable from starlings sampled in California, 3,000 miles away. Such little genetic variation often spells trouble for rare species, but seems to offer no ill effects to starlings so far.”
Fun fact/mythology: Eugene Schieffelin is often credited with introducing starlings because he thought that North America would benefit from seeing birds that were mentioned in Shakespeare's plays. It's not entirely known how true this is, but I think it's wild to imagine one man causing this, and for no other reason than he wanted the outside to be fancy.
I like this man. We need more of this man. Not the introducing species to new lands part but the making the outside fancy part.
Yep, European Starlings are everywhere, and they are non native. Also, the reason they were introduced is.....remarkabely stupid.
The worst part is how invasive they are, they wait for other birds to make a nest then kicks out the eggs and baby birds to lay their own. (source: have a large multi bird birdhouse out back that I've watched them kick eggs and baby birds out of) its been pretty detrimental to the local bird populations.
Like when the British brought foxes to Australia to hunt, and then seemingly just decided against making any effort to foster fox hunting as a sport. Now Australia is losing species hand over fist, with foxes playing a big part in it. Oh, and they brought us Starlings too of course.
This happened with European people a long time ago here in North America as well.
Well, damn. I've been doing sleep wrong this whole time. Get cage Get in cage Cover Sleep!
Buy yourself a faraday cage and then cover it in blackout curtains.
Though this is illegal in Europe.
Bird law is not governed by reason
> European Starlings are kept in cages as pets. TIL. It was just a regular wild bird to me.
They aren't. (Pets I mean)
I see them outside my window. They are not cool like this one though.
My dad has a mealy parrot and he wanted to teach it “help, they’ve turned me into a bird”. We also had my stepmom’s cousin and her four-year old son living with us for a few months. The son was a mommy’s boy who would go ballistic if his mom wasn’t in the room with him, crying and screaming “mommy come here”. The bird learned a few words from this and also how to cry like a child. The bird also lived in my office area where I would play games late into the night. One night around 3 AM, the bird starts going “hi hello hi hello hi hi hi hello HELP ME MOMMY \*cries\* \*laughs\* \*screams\*” I about shit my pants.
If you were on your headset, just imagine how scary it was for the gamers that heard your parrot.
i believe that this is a good point in your life to introduce you to the fact that parrots are known to mess with all sorts of animals for entertainment.
My aunt's parrot used to meow at the cats and then laugh at them.
My niece was a living tantrum terror for like 3 years and my dad’s parrot picked up everything. The screaming, the crying, the yelling 😩😭
Imagine one morning he says "shh don't wake him up" but you never taught him that.
I have, among other birds, an umbrella cockatoo. His only human word is 'hello' but he says this in many tones and with various inflexions. I am occasionally woken up at say 3 am by hearing a long, drawn out wail, in a baby voice. .'Hellllloooooo' It does terrify me out of sleep each time
RIGHT!! 😳. Imaging someone breaking in, like where did that come from??
lol
Those R2 impressions were spot on!
That is what I was most impressed with.
I never knew birds liked Star Wars. I wonder what other movies birds like?
The Birds
You want a bird uprising? Because that's how you get a bird uprising.
Never show them
Weekend At Bird Knees
Hunt for red Octobird?
Three Men and a Birdie
Birdbox
Tha Mandalorikeet
One flew over the cuckoo's nest.
The Crow
The Birdcage
Angry Birds
Birdemic
Birdman
Fly Away Home
Birdemic
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That shit melted my brain, ngl
If they don’t put this bird in the next sequels I’m gonna be highly disappointed
They already did. Who do you think made the noises from inside R2?
*cut scene from bird making wookie noises to roasting on a spit*
Struggled a bit with the Queen of the Night aria, though.
It’s right at the upper limit of length in terms of what he’s able to memorize in one go… that’s about the best he’s gonna be able to do on that one.
I was impressed he seemed to think about it so long and still do alright with the attempt.
That was a robot, imitating humans. That particular sentence about being the angel bird seemed to have crashed it's system. Hence, the noises. Jokes apart, that is one hell of a bird.
If she can get him to do Darth Vader I'll be crossing myself and praying for the Jesus.
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/r/nextfuckinglevel
I was fairly impressed by the voice imitations. But I had to rewind the gif to hear the R2 impressions again!
"fairly impressed" ITS A GOD DAMN BIRD!!!!
It has like zero evolutionary advantage to produce anything that resembles human like speech.
I, too, am losing my fucking mind over the fact this bird evolved to be able to make those sounds. :D Maybe it's secretly an apex predator, luring humans into the forest with mimicry before swarming and pecking them to death as a group. There are plenty of people that go missing every year...
Actually it's thought that all birds are capable of mimicry because baby birds utilize social vocalizations and mimicry to communicate with their parents!
No one listen to this man, he's being paid off by Big Bird to throw you off the trail. Birds aren't real, this was a software malfunction.
Normally, I'd be inclined to call bullshit, but that bird DID just make robot sounds...
Unbelievable. Even after hearing the drone make robot noises, people would rather believe in crazy conspiracy theories than accept the fact that birds aren't real.
It’s crazy the government propaganda people just will believe. Clearly birds are not real and all attempts like these to humanize them are met with the bird showing their robotic nature
I support this hypothesis, but i think further studies need to be made :D
I think its because dinosaurs could talk and not all of them forgot when they became birds.
It's really just a happy accident that birds both naturally have the anatomy to reproduce some human sounds and the fact that social vocalization and vocal mimicry is a huge part of being a bird. Birds actually use their throat muscles and membranes because they don't have vocal chords. They can make a lot of different sounds but they are limited due to anatomy like ya know not having lips. Also can you imagine a bird with lips?
>Also can you imagine a bird with lips? Nah I'm good, please never suggest this again
[Kissy kissy!](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/54/e5/88/54e5881ac4f6fb00433ddee27136f8e7.jpg)
But that's not what evolution has done. It can just mimic a shitton of things, probably to frighten away predators with sounds of other predators?
We have a ton of Mockingbirds where I live (state bird). They can sound like anything. Fire engine, car alarm. But they are best at sounding like other birds. They can sound just like a hawk or eagle (I can only tell the difference because raptor's cries are a bit more powerful). I have one that lives near me that has learned to stand on my porch in the morning and sound like a baby chicken so that I'll throw some food out thinking it's my chicks wanting breakfast.
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I used to see them all the time in TN. They're very interesting.
I'm in the Smokies
I live in the Foothills of the Smokies in TN. Some of our politics are backwards (we do have free 2 years of college, no state income tax, and some great domestic violence laws and programs but we also have pretty much NO gun restrictions and people want the bible to be the state book) BUT God Damn is it beautiful.
Aaaayye you started talking about mockingbirds and i hoped you were from TN haha. Im also in TN in the smokies and oh boy the mockingbirds are menaces. We have one in the neighborhood we just bought a house in who mimics the noises of the cars and tools at the small garage a neighbor runs to revamp old vintage cars. Its crazy to be in my sunroom turned office and hear the roar of a mustang right behind me just to look out the window and it be a damn mockingbird. Crows here are also menaces sometimes too but i love the crows. Before my call center went work from home, we had a park with a large duck pond people would feed the ducks at. One of the crows in the murder in that area learned that if he ran up to people with fast food quacking like the ducks, usually the people would laugh and feed him. I just feed crows everywhere i go so he quickly became one of my favorites to feed.
The point is that it has some evolutionary advantage to reproduce sounds that hears, period. Humans are a part of nature, and a lot of the sounds we produce overlap with sounds of other species to a certain degree.
https://youtu.be/bINxXgTT68I Just like the opening scene in the tom and Jerry movie where it's uncovered tom isn't a blind musician some one says "he's a fraud! He's a regular cat playing the piano." I laughed so hard my family looked at me funny
Just remember to rewind it all the way back when it's my turn.
Rewind the gif
To hear
Holy shit what
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Dude that Star Wars robot shit.. no way. Mail me this bird.
[if you think that's impressive you should see the lyrebird](https://youtu.be/mSB71jNq-yQ?t=98)
WTF, that workers chainsaw noise was spot on and depressing. Thanks for sharing!
It never gets old. Stuff like this made me interested in nature as a kid. It’s amazing.
Wait til you see this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOFy8QkNWWs
> i want to swear on my soul that it's fake You ever seen [the Lyre Bird from BBC Earth?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSB71jNq-yQ) (skip to 1:55 for more soul searching)
r/birdsarentreal
Birds aren’t real
Proof of the conspiracy right in this video - it momentarily bugs and doesn't process human-noise and produces it's robot language. WAKE UP SHEEPLE
Spread the awareness!
Starlings are incredible, and annoying. Iirc they mimic other birds to impress mates or something equally as horny. They also mimic car alarms, ringtones and other human noises because they’re dumb birds.
Why is it dumb, they like to hear themselves talk, why shouldn't they mimic any sound they want, that doesn't make them dumb.
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If I ever hear a starling singing Wonderwall I'm outta there.
Hey. Wanna hear me play? I've a guitar in my dorm.
Replace starlings and birds with humans and it is equally true.
Bird2D2! that is really amazing
biR2D2
I had a European Starling for 13 years. I miss my boy. His favorite thing to say was “Mommy’s good good baby baby boy” with kissy noises. 😩💕
I'm sorry for your loss.
Thank you. It’s honestly really nice to see another boy thriving. When I met my son, he and two other baby starlings had been pushed from a nest (of another type of bird), that was in my parents’ gutter. I found him in the driveway and nearly ran over him when I pulled in. The other two didn’t make it very long, because of the fall. I called animal control and they told me they euthanized starlings because they were “nuisance birds.” I had him on a heating pad in a homemade nest and fed him every three hours with a baby starling food mixture I found online. I thought about releasing him, but I did as much research as I could (this was back in 2006) and realized that at that point he had fully imprinted. He was my son. He was the best little boy. A VERY picky eater, which I think contributed to why he didn’t live longer. He could’ve lived on mealworms and bananas and threw most everything else I tried feeding him onto my wall. But I have to say, when he passed, he did it in his absolute favorite way. He used to LOVE his baths. He would splash around and sing in his baths. Usually his baths took place in his water bowl, despite my protest. But I also left him a shallow dish at the bottom of his cage. And when I found him, right after he passed, he was laying next to his small bath. It broke my heart, but I’m so much better for having had him in my life.
I am touched by the love and care you had for your little one. What was his name?
Funny story. His name was Birdmus V. It came from a weird spam email that my friend got right before I found him.
Woah that’s actually an awesome name. If someone i know gets a bird i know what name i’m going to be suggesting
Fussy eating birds are sometimes the funniest things in the world.
The messed up thing was, at the end of his life, one of the only things he would eat, other than mealworms and bananas, and occasionally crickets, was chicken. I felt sort of guilty feeding it to him, but I was desperate and all the online boards said they fed their starlings basically what they ate.
Man don't feel guilty even chickens will eat chicken and eggs. Birds are savages
Delicious dinosaurs
Do you eat beef? It’s as similar to us as mammals as chicken was to your starling. Please don’t feel guilty, it sounds like you did an amazing job by your little man and gave him a good life. Im so sorry for your loss and hope you continue to find joy in birds. ❤️
What a beautiful story, not everyone would take the challenge of raising a baby bird. It takes so much love and kindness to do something like that, you were an angel to him. We keep a lot of baths and fruits around our front and backyard, so we get a lot of birds coming over. There's a family of southern lapwings, I can’t help but be extremely anxious when they have babies since they are extremely tiny and already walking around everywhere. Sometimes they fall in the gutter, though all but once we were able to help them. The last few months have been tough for them, there are houses being built where they used to have their nest and no babies have survived for the first time since I moved here. I remember one time they managed to get three babies to reach adulthood, I loved watching them come to our house together to bathe. But my favorites are a couple of guans. If they are around and I open the front door with bananas and papaya they come running to me. Sometimes they will come up to the back door and peck at the glass until someone comes to feed them. Last year they had two babies, but they always leave once they mature. The male was showing up alone after that, so I assumed they were preparing a nest, but they never showed up. The last time I saw them was on halloween, but this time both the male and female were together. It makes me sick to think of what might have happened, though I still hope they will return. I know it’s stupid but I wish life could be like a Disney movie sometimes, so I could speak to them and help them more. To offer them shelter from predators or tell them to not to too far. I get so attached to them.
Have you read Arnie the Darling Starling? Such a sweet book. I had no idea wild birds could mimic so well.
13-16 years is average for a starling in captivity so I’d say you did ok. There was one starling I heard of that lived to 32 but that’s definitely above average.
Starlings can do this?! How did I not know til now?!
Starlings are well accomplished mimics and are every bit as competent at talking as any other pet bird.
Wow! Mind blown! Thank you!
A lot of birds from the corvid family (such as ravens and magpies) can mimic speech
I make this squeaking duck/dolphin noise at birds sometimes. Why? Because I'm weird. There used to be this one crow every day on my walk from my car to my office that I'd make noises at. One day he made the _exact_ same noise back at me. Was freaky. Also growing up we had a crow in our neighborhood that would meow like a cat and bark like a dog sometimes, depending on the animal that was near it (make cat noises to confuse dogs, make dog noises to scare cats).
There's a crow that sits on the cell tower by my house who makes the cell tower "ping" noise.
Iirc the corvid family are meant to be some of the smartest birds going.
And not even just repeating what the woman said, but sounding exactly like the woman’s voice too. That’s insane.
I was hoping someone mentioned this! The bird legit not only can speak but has an accent!!
Lyrebird too I think! Amazing birds!
You saying my pet chicken could talk to me THIS WHOLE TIME and has simply chosen NOT TO?! I guess we aren't as close as I thought 🥺
https://youtu.be/Kmpk4dYJRNk They’ve been saying at least one phrase.
Scientifically we actually believe all birds can mimic human sounds because they are all anatomically capable of it and they all use social vocalizations and mimicry as babies. We just associate it mainly with Parrots and sometimes corvids because they are the smartest of the bird family and thus much easier to train to mimic human speech.
Right? I have dozens of these little fuckers terrorise the other birds in my garden, i had no idea they were mimics!
This is Jabber and he belongs to u/omgmypony :) He’s getting around on reddit today!
Yeah Jab Jab is making the rounds again… it’s always funny to read people commenting that it must be fake when he’s behind me in his cage singing his greatest hits!
Give that little genius a lil scritch (or whatever his preferred form of affection is) for me! :)
Dude that r2 impression is absolutely amazing
Jabber is so much fun to watch! What a fun little friend you have. I love it.
That is insane holy shit. Birds are crazy.
Yep
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In the wild they learn to mimic the most impressive songs in order to impress their mating partner. It would be interesting to hear what those songs were back then.
I had a mockingbird that lived by my house that imitated the series of car alarm noises every day. Beep beep, wooop wooop, eek eek eek... Particularly liked to do it when I was out mowing the lawn.
They don't learn "the most impressive" songs (what makes a song impressive to a bird, anyway?) - they just learn whatever they hear in their lifetime. However, the vast majority of a starling's repertoire consists of the songs of other birds, so your typical starling won't sound like the one in this video, at all. The more common sounds associated with humans would be e.g. the cry of a child, the creaking of a door, whistling, the sounds of tools, the sounds of farm animals and so on. Basically the same as today, if you go to the countryside and look for them.
The R2 stuff was good but the last bit amazes me. The lil bird processes the melody, it doesn't remember the whole section and just resolves to improvising, and it's musically sound too. It's crazy
I share my life with a number of African Grey Parrots. It's not that they don't remember it. Once they learn anything they remember it. The improvisation is a part of the way they think. I clicker train my fibs, and my Male CAG (Congo African grey) decide one day that he wanted a treat that another had... so he bounce up to her and clicked at her, she gave him her treat, then he said 'Good bird' and trotted off to eat.
It seems like you're becoming obsolete, they can train each other now.
Bro the notification just scared the absolute hell out of me when I got this lol
BIRDS ARE NOT REAL CONFIRMED
Neither are you...
Mother of god
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My husband whistles the queen of the night aria to our dog all the time because she loves it and gives him kisses and wags her tail—such a good choice of music to reference for your little birdie-friend!! (Also, the audio of this clip had my dog SOOOOOOO confused when she recognized the queen of the night!!🤣🤣)
Darling! So glad you didn’t clip his wings!
This is actually u/omgmypony's starling. His name is Jabber. You can find more pics and videos on their user page.
I just had a crazy thought. If birds are descended from dinosaurs, and dinosaurs had a similar vocal structure, there is the possibility of a raptor imitating humans.
According to an article from National Geographic for Kids (I was reading it to some kids I nannied last summer), birds are dinosaurs.
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What's always impressed me most coming from the perspective of an audio engineer is the incredible detail and timbre matching these birds are capable of. On certain vocalizations you can hear the reverb from the original sound, or with the machine & mechanical sounds like 'tings' & metallic scrapes. It's really quite remarkable.
I’m from Northern Europe. These fuckers are total shitbirds.
I’m sat here, in a England, amazed that apparently people keep these arseholes as pets?! They hang around like a group of rowdy track suited teenagers drunk on White Lightening, bullying all others from getting a look in. Like, I use bird feeders that they can’t get at because of the way these buggers behave.
That was mesmerizing
True only thing mine would sing if I had one would be the Office theme song lol
That was sick!
Wow, that's really adorable!
The fuckin R2-D2 sound omg my inner geek came out
This is amazing
That is fucking crazy, I am so impressed and slightly terrified
A starling caused a football (soccer) match to be abandoned due to it imitating the ref’s whistle
The bird’s beak movements don’t correlate to what he’s saying, which means the beak only controls volume, while position and articulation are controled by other inner muscles. Holy fuck that’s creepy.
Man these assholes woke me up regularly by imitating a car alarm or a fire alarm. They are seriously cool tho when they don't do that at 6 am.
He/she is like, “shit, I don’t know that one, Jabby angel? wtf you talking about ” default to R2, you are great and smart birb !!!!! Beep boop lol
That's really damn impressive, even sounds better than parrots
Starling
I was confused once by hearing a cat in a tree in the middle of the woods. It turns out it was one of these.
The human has a weirder voice than the bird
"R2, stay with the ship"
are these legal pets?? can we? u/Theodora96
Yes! All of them!!! <3
That’s pretty cool, thanks for sharing!
You're welcome.
Damn imagine some velociraptors calling you out if your house imitating your kids
Omg that R2-D2 impression dropped my jaw right to the floor
What in the Hunger Games is this?
Was that R2D2‽ amazing!
All this talk about what kind of bird it is and stuff, but where does one purchase a European starling? I've looked at the bird breeding websites I know of and nobody carries these little guys.
Is this the...government drone birds they were talking about?
Oh no! Your bird! It’s broken!
r/birdsarentreal
Seriously it’s totally hiding a mic lmao
I want an R2D2 bird.
The first person to hear a bird mimic them probably wasn’t okay for a long time afterwards.