Flocking to a new level

Stories, legends and lore surrounding mimicry and songbirds stem back hundreds of years. To this day, people wonder how something so far removed from us evolutionarily can so closely imitate what many consider a uniquely human trait: speech.

It is said that President Andrew Jackson’s mouth was so foul that his parrot was ejected from his funeral for “uttering profanity.” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” depended on the famed black bird’s capacity to mimic human speech.

Research performed by a number of scientists—ornithologists, biologists, psychologists and those from other disciplines—have concluded that birds that are capable of mimicry learn from social interactions. It is well documented that domesticated birds are able to learn human speech patterns from their owners and handlers. Further research led to greater understanding on the topic: without immediate feedback, these birds do not tend to learn these behaviors.

In recent years, a fascinating result of this has become known: wild birds with no extensive human contact have been found to mimic human speech as well. When scientists more closely observed this, they discovered the source of the speech input was not human at all.

When let loose, abandoned or lost, domesticated pet birds have been known to join flocks in the wild. And thanks to flock social behavior, the rest of the birds learn to mimic whatever output Polly the Parrot has to offer them. In other words, wild birds learn from pets how to speak in a human tongue, regardless of prior exposure to humans.

Furthermore, this phenomenon has been found to last generations. A superb example is that of the lyrebird. These birds, renowned for their ability to reproduce sounds from their environment, have been known to imitate the sounds of a camera shutter or an axe. Bear in mind that neither shutters nor axes have been present in their habitats for many years. Today’s lyrebirds learned the sounds from their parents and grandparents, and they persist to this day.

It is akin to the formation of a pidgin language. Not pigeon, obviously, though the pun would be fitting. Breakthroughs in human language acquisition could come as a result of studying this behavior. The psychological community could gain insight into how non-humans learn human characteristics. And if approached correctly, study of the phenomenon could potentially aid in the treatment of aphasia and other
muting diseases.

This is a fascinating insight into psychology. This is not simply observational learning. What studies indicate is that birds teach each other what they know. It might give some idea as to how speech developed in humans as well. In time, it may even demonstrate the origins of oral history and other previously human traditions.

However, the greatest possible insight is medicinal. Treatment for and understanding of speech disorders is low in comparison to other fields. The potential for greater understanding of these through studying birds, both wild and domesticated, is enormous.

More research should be done into the psychology and methodology of flock learning in birds. OHSU, with one of the premiere animal labs in the Northwest, currently studies primarily the genetics of these birds. While much can be learned from this as well, more focus should be given to the behavior of the birds themselves.

This is both fascinating and linguistically applicable. While the brains of parrots and other mimicking species are very different from humans, possible insights from research into their capacity to learn and use human speech may help scientists learn more about the development of language.

The phenomenon of birds learning language in their own flocks is more than just scientifically interesting. Whatever you teach your bird to say could be echoed in flocks all over for years should it escape. In other words, if you don’t teach your bird to say something massively disconcerting—“Come, hero, on a quest” is my personal favorite—then you might as well not teach it anything at all.