It has the longest ranging mating call out of all birds, sings from an amplification bowl that it tramples into the ground. He then starts to transmit the most amazing message that can be heard as far as four miles away. What is so awesome about the kakapo is that it puffs itself up, till it is about twice its original size, and it “booms” you can view a video of the boom here.
As you saw in the video, the Kakapo doesn’t sing, but instead, makes this booming sound from an amplification bowl which he tramples, after which, he sits inside, inflates his thoracic sac. during this process, he can be double his original size! They start with low grunts, which increase in volume as the sac inflates. Each male booms up to 8 hours a night, and may do this continually up to 2 months. Lek mating, it is called. This is perhaps taking into account that an interested female have to walk all the way through the forest, past many obstacles and potential predators, to meet the male. Talk about love.
Truly an amazing creature, the Kakapo is very much endangered. It cannot be bred in captivity, will not nest if the tree with its favorite food does not bear fruit, its eggs have 50% chance of being infertile, and the chicks never hatch. Among other reasons for their low reproductivity rate.
Kakapo's size, in relation to humans.
The Kakapo, also called owl parrot, is a specie of nocturnal parrot native to New Zealand. The largest parrot in the world, with the heaviest (up to 3.6 kilograms), the Kakapo slowly lost its ability to fly when the islands off New Zealand broke off, and with it, the loss of mammalian predators.
Kakapo populations crashed when stoats were introduced to New Zealand from Europe in the 1880s. The birds’ strong scent and flightlessness makes them easy prey for stoats, cats and other predators, which they make no attempt to evade. Hopefully, we can save this fascinating animal before its too late….. All 90 of them.
To kick things off, here’s a video of a really smart bird.
The smart little Einstein. Isn’t it amazing that animal can actually “talk” and even converse with us?
African grey parrots are known for their ability to “speak” our language. Indeed the African grey parrots are highly intelligent and are able to learn fast. According to a website, the African Gray Parrot is a very talkative, intelligent, and sensitive bird and may be the best talker of all the birds, easily learning hundreds of words and other sounds (Enchanted learning, 209). While it is true that African grey parrots have the ability to learn words and sounds, the questions often asked are: What mechanisms do the parrots have which allow them to learn and to “talk”? What is the best learning method for teaching these parrots to speak our language?
Basically, African grey parrots have the innate ability to mimic – also known as allospecific vocal learning (Pepperberg, 1994). In the wild, African grey parrots imitate voice of other bird species, rather than rely on hardwired vocal communications like other birds, so as to communicate in a more sophisticated method that allows the parrots to express specific contexts (Scientific American, 2009). Similarly, parrots mimic human vocalisations by mapping or adapting them to their own code (Pepperberg, 2002).
African grey parrot in the wild
Such vocal learning by an African grey parrot is best achieved when it is goal-directed. According to research, African grey parrots are found to have learnt best with the presence of live human tutors (Pepperberg, 1994). Research has suggested that human interactions with the African grey parrots such as engaging with them during the learning, rewarding them after they have successfully performed the human vocalisation greatly increase the parrot’s ability to learn. Like many other animal training, reinforcements are important for the animals to pick up abilities which are new to them, which they are not familiar with. Without people to guide them, the African grey parrots do not learn as quickly as those guided by people. Therefore, human presence is important since it helps the parrots to learn by reinforcing the vocalisations with the appropriate cues.
Judging by the parrot’s high ability to learn, they do seem to be smart enough to pick up a diversity of vocalisations through mimicking. Some may argue that repeating the same speech doesn’t exactly make a parrot intelligent. So how smart is a parrot exactly? Does the parrot have the ability to create new speeches from the ones which were taught to it? According to an article, the African grey parrots are able to perform successful vocal segmentation, whereby the birds seem to understand and recombine individual vocal units in novel ways to form a novel vocalization (Pepperberg, 2005). This discovery implies that the parrots have phonological awareness and do have the intelligence to perform linguistic processing. Although the process of getting the parrots to form new speeches is slow and random, yet such process is rather complex for an animal and is also rare. Therefore, this makes the African grey parrot very much an intelligent bird – in the animal sense (since it is not likely to understand the human language as much as we would have loved).
Alex – the smart African grey parrot which was researched upon
Truly, the African grey parrots have become one of the animal celebrities in the showbiz. Though they are smart and charming, we must not forget that teaching these lovable parrots the skill of acquiring human language does conditioned them to the human environment, so much so that living in the wild may seem almost impossible for them to cope and survive well. As what the website has stated “When parrots are kept as pets, they learn their calls from their adoptive human social partners. In the wild, though, their calls may go much higher in pitch and much faster in tempo than any human tutor’s voice” (Scientific American, 2009).
Therefore, it is important that people know the consequences behind training the grey parrots and ensure that domesticated grey parrots are treated with care and love. Because once they have become a pet to keep us accompanied, to entertain us, the parrots would have also lost their ability to grow up in their natural environment and the ability to survive in an environment without us.
Super Star!!!
Reference:
Journal Article:
Irene M. P. (2002). Cognitive and communication abilities of grey parrots. Current Directions in Psychological Science, p. 83-87
Irene M. P. (1994) Allospecific referential speech acquisition in grey parrots (psittacus erithacus): evidence for multiple levels of avian vocal imitation. Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, p.109-131
Irene M. P. (2007) Grey parrots do not always ‘parrot’: the roles of imitation and phonological awareness in the creation of new labels from existing vocalizations. Language Sciences, 29, p.1-13
Irene M. P. (1994). Vocal learning in grey parrots (psittacus erithacus): effects of social interaction, reference, and context. The Auk. 111 (2), p.300-3131
A very amusing collection of cat vocalisations which sound like words! Domestic cats may vocalise more to owners than to each other due the reinforcement they receive from the former.
