An Australian musk duck was able to reproduce sounds and speech (Representational image)
Move over parrots: Scientists have stumbled upon a cloning bird whose repertoire extends beyond the demand of firecrackers.
An Australian musk duck was able to remember and reproduce sounds and speech – mimicking the noise of a door slamming and someone humming the phrase “You bloody fool.”
Biologist Karel Ten Cate says she found it “hard to believe” when she found the claim that musk ducks could parrot human speech.
But he decided to go hunting to see if it was true.
Hours of searching through the archives brought them to a terrifying 1987 recording of “Ripper”—a hand-picked specimen that was four years old at the time and lived in the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve near Canberra.
“You bloody fu,” the duck says over and over, “you bloody fu,” dropping the “l,” which is clearly hard for the ducks to do.
Sounds accompanied the ripper’s mating performance, according to the study published Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
A male musk duck stuns competitors with repetitive sounds, usually accompanied by kicking, while “the tail is held in a different position”.
The report states that Peter Fulger, the recorder, intentionally “angry” the duck by approaching the cage.
The Ripper will start his dance – but then instead of making simple duck noises will mumble the insult.
And his vocal skills went further.
Fulgar also recorded the Ripper imitating the sound of a light door slamming.
Sonogram analysis revealed that the sound was similar to that made by a screen door next to the sink, with the ripper as a duck.
Ten Kate says that the fact that the Ripper reproduced the sounds he most likely heard when he was young is an important finding of research.
“The type of vocal learning shown by Ripper was thought to be present only in songbirds, hummingbirds and parrots,” he said.
– Elephants also make sounds –
In addition to ducks, Philosophical Transactions’ special animal vocal learning issue delves into the sounds made by elephants, dolphins and seals.
Research collected from adult African elephants in Botswana, South Africa, Germany and Austria explored their ability to reproduce distinctive trumpet and snuff sounds on cue.
A male named Jabu, who began learning to speak on cue when he was a calf, was able to produce seven different sounds on cue with nearly 100 percent accuracy.
Other elephants who learned in adulthood still managed to respond correctly more than 80 percent of the time, the study said, suggesting a “complex level” of vocal on-cue learning across the species.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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