Bird Sounds

Birds can be very impressive at imitation, which is another word for copying. When chicks are born, they hear sounds made by the other birds in their flock, or their family. And they practice imitating those sounds, until they sound just like the rest of their flock! There are lots of reasons that birds might need to know the sounds that other animals make. For one thing, birds in the wild are very social. They help out other members of their flock. The calls of different flocks of birds, even two different flocks of the same kind of bird, are all different from each other! It helps to know who your family is by the familiar sounds they make! Plus, it's helpful to learn animal calls that might scare away predators, so that the birds don't get eaten! And being good at imitating shows that a bird is smart, and has a good memory and strong muscles, which makes it more appealing to other birds in its flock. The birds that can copy human speech are especially talented imitators. Birds that learn to imitate humans come from two groups: parrots, like African greys, cockatoos, and parakeets...and songbirds, like mynahs, starlings, and even crows! They're such good imitators that sometimes they can even fool people! Some pet birds have escaped into the wild, and taught the calls they learned from humans, to the other birds in their new flock. So sometimes people have gone for a nature walk, and heard someone calling out. They looked around for a person ... only to realise that the birds were the ones talking.