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Wild Parrots Learning To Talk From Escaped Pet Birds
bazzalunatic writes "Be careful what you teach a parrot. Some chatty pet parrots that have escaped back into the wild have taught wild parrots to talk. Seems the phenomenon could be integrated into the flock through generations. From the article: 'The evolution of language could well be passed on through the generations, says Ken. "If the parents are talkers and they produce chicks, their chicks are likely to pick up some of that," he says. This phenomenon is not unique; some lyrebirds in southern Australia still reproduce the sounds of axes and old shutter-box cameras their ancestors once learnt.'" While this doesn't reach the amazing level of Washoe the chimpanzee teaching sign language, it is still interesting and reminiscent of something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
Maybe they really are pining for the fyords.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Will now be greeted with the endless chants of "Get off my lawn!".
Rise of the Planet of the Parrots
You would think that entropy would degrade any language learned pretty quickly, but those lyrebirds seem to demonstrate that sort of behavior sticks rather than fades rapidly.
Makes me wonder how small a trigger was required to spark human speech evolution. At one time, we probably weren't all that different than these lyrebirds/parrots.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Or are they just parroting back what the teacher is saying?
Parrots learn words but not language. Associating words with rewards through Pavlovian training is not communication. Clearly spoken gibberish is still gibberish.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
I have noticed this with my quaker (monk) parrots. I have had sets of two over the past 25 years and what the two birds I have today was actually originally tough to previous birds I once had. It seems that they teach each other much like children teach children's games to one and other.
Parrots have been observed teaching other adult parrots to talk, so I'm not sure what's more amazing about Washoe. Unlike chimps, the wild parrots learned as well.
Have parrots successfully passed the Turing test... this seems like very much the same approach as cleverbot... robottically repeating sounds and phrases that it once heard without any read understanding of meaning
One of Washoe's caretakers was pregnant and missed work for many weeks after she miscarried. Roger Fouts recounts the following situation:
"People who should be there for her and aren't are often given the cold shoulder--her way of informing them that she's miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing "MY BABY DIED". Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat's eyes again and carefully signed "CRY", touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human. (Chimpanzees don't shed tears.) Kat later remarked that that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences."[22]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoe_%28chimpanzee%29
Damn, that's incredible
Everyone go out, buy some parrots, teach them all sorts of language, "lose" them, done.
Pretty soon, we will have parrots the world over saying "quaack, GET OFF MY LAWN, beowulf cluster quaaaack"
This. Must. Happen.
Wandering in the jungle hearing voices.... "Zoom zoom zoom"
Parrots and TV commercials don't mix...
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While E.Starlings are not as talented at it as other mimics, they can achieve a somewhat 'bad recording' style mimic of the human voice. They're also the ones notorious for producing large undulating clouds in the sky (consisting of thousands if not, in extreme cases, millions of birds.) Point being, I've always wanted to somehow snag a gigantic flock of these birds and train them all to say something creepy like 'i'll get you' before releasing them back into the wild.
None of these parrots escape from homes that frequently watch Jersey Shore. Future generations will despise us.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
Look forward to our new talking parrot overlords.
IT was funny as hell in college when I bought that bird that had problems for almost nothing.... $50.00 for a Blue and Yellow giant McCaw is unheard of and he was a nice bird, never bit hard....
But it would wear a LOT. "fucking watermelons" was one of it's favorite things to say. It's funny for about 3 months. then the damn thing's non stop talking and swearing get's old. it would assemble strange words together as well. I had that bird for 5 years before I found a zoo that would take him and deal with the problems.
He loved sitting on people and then sqwuak as loud as possible into the ear, then start swearing at you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I keep parrots and have been predicting this for some time. The ability to talk is incredibly advantageous in a world increasingly dominated by people, and so there would be a strong selection effect in its favor. Since they can do it, and since there are birds passing between the wild and the human worlds, I would look for this to spread, especially (as the story says) for birds in city flocks.
I call {{fact}}.
I think one of the TinTin/Kuifje comics already used this as a joke, or otherwise it was an early Suske&Wiske. Which means it's from 1960 or before, so nothing new here.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Rise of The Planet Of The Parrots!
Laugh it up, talking parrots are everywhere. They have infiltrated our sites and our TVs, spreading misinformation and fanbotism in an attempt to undermine the gullible humans.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Also, anecdotal evidence can be inaccurate, sometimes based on anecdotes, second-hand accounts of events or hearsay.
Anecdotal evidence, which may itself be true and verifiable, can be used to deduce a conclusion which does not follow from it, usually by generalising from an insufficient amount of evidence. For example "my grandfather smoked like a chimney and died healthy in a car crash at the age of 99" does not disprove the proposition that "smoking markedly increases the probability of cancer and heart disease at a relatively early age". While the evidence is true, it does not warrant the conclusion made from it.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Krrck - Don't tame me, bro.
Fandroids hate facts.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uguXNL93fWg
According to William S. Burroughs (and a Laurie Anderson song inspired by him), language is a virus.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Anyone seen the cartoon?? I hope the manbird language doesnt transfer. We'll be hearing "suck my balls" everywhere!!
Since I use my parrot as my password database (she's pretty good at repeating the password if I give her the account name) I better make sure the next generations don't get away from me. OTOH - it's good to know I have a backup system, of sorts, going for my passwords now.
Where I live the mockingbirds have taken up the rotating car alarm sound as a mating call. Can be really annoying when one lonely one perches outside your window and sings all night.
Birds have been proven (by SCIENCE no less) to be fairly intelligent animals, totally not honoring that silly "bird brain" nonsense. Is this surprising to anyone with a minimum of interest in ornithology?
My cockateil has taught my two quakers, and a parakeet to speak. I'm still working on the look out below, but they do say Poopie right before they excrete.
Man, only if we could get pigeons to learn to talk (yep in NYC).
Cheers,
Bill
Fouts, Roger (1997). Next of Kin: what chimpanzees have taught me about who we are. William Morrow and Company. ISBN 068814862X.
My girlfriend's mother used to feed the wild parrots outside her house in Australia and every day she'd greet them by saying 'encyclopaedia' to try to teach them to say it. But after 6 months of failure, she took to greeting them with 'hello stupid'.
Move on a few years, and she went walking in a nearby national park when a flock of parrots flew overhead. Hello stupid!!!
It contains both original fottage from 30 years ago and recent interviews with participants.
I was amazed with the parallels with Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
The Nim Project was designed to replicate/test Washoe's results. But its results were used to repudiate ape language. Both experiments had tantalizing result and major procedural flaws.
Nim like Washoe could read and manipulate human emotions pretty well. But he could not control his own.
Check out Clever Hans and then ask yourself why people demand extraordinary evidence.
Personally, I don't think humans are all that special. We're ruled much more by our lower/base instincts than we like to admit. Most of what appears to ourselves like free will appears (from research) to be post-hoc rationalization rather than actual free will.
HAND.
Have Dr. Sbaitso read a hex dump of your backups to your parrot an let him go. You'll have redundant backups forever.
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Neither Washoe nor any other non-human primate has learnt sign language in any meaningful way -- not anything that stands up to a bit of critical review. They were certainly smart -- smart enough to learn "If I mimic enough of these signs eventually someone will give me a banana". They were also followed around by credulous 'researchers' who were eager to interpret any hand wave as highly significant, and who in fact so credulous that they didn't notice that most of the time the primates were simply mimicking back to them a gesture that they had just made.
If you want an assessment of how close they were to using sign language, ask someone for whom sign language is a first language to take a look. Without exception, native signers are unimpressed.
As far as parrots go, they're not learning to talk, or learning words -- they're learning to imitate sounds. There's no difference, as far as the parrot is concerned, between "polly want a cracker" and a squawk.
There are lyrebirds near where I live which have learnt to make laser sounds from when there was a laser skirmish being run in the bush. Hearing them make laser sounds at each other is amusing, but no-one ever suggests that they have learnt to play laser skirmish from humans and therefore lyrebirds must have the same game-playing abilities as humans.
There were flocks of migrating wild parrots in Los Angeles in the 80s that would chatter away; they had been "taught" by escaped/abandoned pet parrots. They were a common landscape feature. What was even spookier was them mimicking car alarms and sirens.
I met someone once who had a cockatiel that talked, and when they got a new bird (a parakeet), they came to find that the cockatiel had taught the parakeet to talk.
As far as humans teaching parrots, I found a fascinating way of getting them to learn well is a three-way teaching model.
It's called the Model/Rival technique where the teacher (model) teaches another person (rival) in front of the bird, and the bird learns very fast.
Someone should teach a few of them, and after let them go, to say: "we come in peace" and "bring me to your leader". :)
Oh dear.
I really hope parrots that swear like Rude Ruby never escape.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJgfAle6TdY&feature=related
As a matter of fact this bird had escaped once and was insulting people out and about, hence the owner found his parrot again.
Who says swearing is no good for you ?
Oh dear. I really hope parrots that swear like Rude Ruby never escape. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJgfAle6TdY&feature=related As a matter of fact this bird had escaped once and was insulting people out and about, hence the owner found his parrot again. Who says swearing is no good for you ?
I own a grey and have been closely monitoring and researching them for awhile now. Some challenge that they are merely simple birds with amusing mimic capabilities however what is discounted is their highly intelligent behavior developed from their unique evolutionary situations. In the wild monkeys try to steal thier eggs so they learn combinations of shrieking tailored to scare a particular monkey away. I see this behavior with my grey telling my dog to "get down" or "leave it" when he starts sniffing around his cage. They spend a lot of time around watering holes foraging and such. they are able to locate threats from reflections in the water and indicate they can identify their own reflection. Dogs do not have this cognitive ability. Further they are experts at cracking complicated nuts making them incredible puzzle solvers. I have given strange nuts and other puzzles to my bird before and noticed him slowly unravelling and breaking it down. They love to tear things apart. Mine has even figured out how to open his lock and roam free around the house.
Australia has an amazing population of parrot species sociable birds and extremely entertaining to watch, sometimes I think they are putting a show on or just showing off. Even wild ones are easy to make friends with they are an australian favourite even though they tend to chew through just about anything (that beak could sever a finger quite efficiently) that they feel like. It's amazing just how sentient these birds are.
Probably the funniest thing to do is to give one of these guys an unshelled macadamia. They can smell how good the nut is but it's really hard for them to break it. Obviously if they learn to talk they would only ask for something to eat.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I hope they do learn to talk. It would be nice to have someone other than ourselves to talk to. Someone who isn't going to try to eat us.
...but wait until this happens with man-birds!