You've Almost Certainly Been Duped by a Bird

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/11/vocal-sound-mimicry-birds-animals/672159/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/bdx0I

On a dusky evening in 2007, while completing her Ph.D., Laura Kelley was traipsing through the backwoods of Queensland, Australia, when she heard her landlady shouting for her cat. Bonnie! Bonnie! Bonnie! came the call, just as it did every mealtime. Kelley peered across the property, hoping to say hello—but the woman was nowhere to be found. Only when Kelley gazed upward did she discover the true source of the sound: a spotted bowerbird perched in a nearby tree.

The bowerbird almost certainly wasn’t intentionally messing with Kelley, or what might have been a very confused cat. But it had the vocal chops to fool her several times during her stint in Queensland—a feat that’s both impressive and discomfiting. “It was so astonishingly accurate,” Kelley, who’s now studying animal behavior at the University of Exeter, in England, told me. “On more than one occasion, I got caught out.”

Spotted bowerbirds are just one of hundreds of avian species that can mimic a whole menagerie of sounds—the laughter of children, the roar of a chainsaw, the wail of a police siren, the click of a camera shutter. There are birds that mimic other birds; there are birds that mimic more than one bird at once.

Mimicry, at its core, is the catalyst for farce: At its most powerful, it can make other animals (humans among them) question their own senses, or behave in ways they otherwise might not. Pulling it off requires awareness of one’s environment, and of the fragile social networks that single sounds can upend. Birds can manipulate their fellows into a false reality—and the way they manage it is something that the best polyglots among us can’t even dream to achieve.

*snip*

[Frasier Balzov]

1. My mailbox keeps getting duped on.

[crickets]

2. Fascinating stuff - fun article! nt

[Maraya1969]

3. I freaked the first time I heard my bird laughing exactly like me.

I was also on the phone and the other person was amazed at the extra "me" that he heard in the background.

[Maru Kitteh]

4. Oh my gosh that would be freaky!

Rod Sterling on line 4 . . .