Avian cognition/psychology question

Factual Questions
1

I have a (mostly)tame budgerigar that also mimics human speech and other sounds.

Something odd happened last night; about a month or more ago, I was trying to teach him to mimic a specific new phrase - the first bit of the ‘Manah Manah’(sp?) song made popular by the muppets - but anyway he didn’t seem to be picking it up and at least a couple of weeks ago, I just sort of stopped trying. He has since learned a number of other short words.

So last night, he was sitting on my shoulder, making a wide range of sounds and muttering broken and complete words and phrases, when suddenly, he uttered a sound that was unmistakably the ‘Manah Manah’ song, although it was far from perfect in its rendition.
As the evening progressed, he happened to say it again and again, and without any further training or repetition of the desired phrase, his rendition of it became noticeably clearer.

This got me to thinking, but I think I’ll insert a disclaimer first:
There follows a piece of possibly rather fanciful speculation; I am well aware of the dangers of generalising based upon small, informal data sets, as indeed I am aware that the plural of such small informal datasets is not considered admissible as hard evidence to those that would desire such. Finally, I am also aware that laymen are prone to silly anthropomorphism as well as general misinterpretation of observations; if, by the end of reading this post, your only purpose will be to remind me of something in this vain, please consider expending the energy elsewhere.

Now I’d have fully expected him to have to practice a bit in order to improve his performance of any phrase to concert standard, but what’s odd here is that, unlike when he was taught the other phrases in his vocabulary, there has been a period of at least two weeks in which he has not heard the phrase, yet he still managed to say it, BUT he still required practice to get it right.

I’m sure there are any number of possible explanations to this, but to me, the most blindingly obvious would seem to be that he has eidetic recall of sounds; that he was not only able to remember the sound, but was, in some sense, replaying it internally to himself in order to practice and improve his mimicry of it.

So… finally, the general question is this: has there been any research with results in this sort of field - as to how birds might perceive and remember sounds?

2

See the article (it’s one of the last ones on the page) on Song Learning on this page. At least in passerines, some species may learn their song from adults when very young, go through a period of not singing at all, and then reproduce the adult song from memory.

I am not sure if there has been similar research on parrots, which also learn vocalizations (obviously).

3

Sorry, I screwed up the link:

http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/birdcommunication.html

4

Thanks for that, Colibri, I was hoping you’d post in this thread. The info looks interesting; I’ll have a proper read of it tomorrow.

But it does seem like there are two distinct functions going on; remembering a sound and learning to make the sound; anthropomorphising again, like I might hear an Irishman talking; the memory of his voice and accent might stick with me for years; I might even be able to ‘hear’ it internally, yet my first attempt to mimic it - whether that happens right after hearing it, or much much later - is likely to be flawed with the potential for improvement with practice.

5

Yes, that’s exactly what happens - as the article mentions. Birds that learn vocalizations first produce imperfect versions, then improve with practice.

In the case of your budgie, it may have first been comparing the sound it produced with its own internal recollection of the original, and improved it with repitition.

6

This is totally amazing to me. Not just that the bird remembered, but that it was capable of self-correction without any further external cues. Wow!

7

That’s precisely what amazed me. As I said, I don’t wish to unnecessarily anthropomorphise, but it seems likely to me that, in some sense, he was ‘playing back’ the auditory memory ‘in his head’ and practising his mimicry of it by comparison.

8

My cockatiels do this, especially the more dominant male. I’ve whistled songs, trying to teach them, and they get pieces of it, but, later, I hear them practicing and developing skill, later whistling the parts I didn’t know they “got” upon trying to teach them. They also use certain parts of their repertoire to get my attention. I’ve noticed that these bits are the ones taught early on, or simple ones like “Wolf Whistle” Wheeeet Wheeewww!. My birds have a separate room, with a closed door because of cats. When we all get up in the morning, they hear me pass by the door on the way to the kitchen, and vocalize their best bits. Loudly. Good Morning!

An interesting aside: I open the windows to my bird’s room in warm weather. Last year, I noticed that the resident mockingbird nesting on that side of the house had incorporated some of the cockatiel’s odd screechy calls into his repertoire. Makes total sense, as they are right in the mocker’s territory.

9

The exciting aspect of this -to me, the armchair philosopher - is that it seems to imply that there are conscious processes happening. Of course I realise about the whole Turing-unknowability of the thought-life of another entity, and I also realise that the phenomenon here described could probably be explained away in terms of mismatched neural networks being brought into balance (although the same could of course be argued about what’s going on behind the scenes in my own head, right now), but still, it seems to betray a sparkle of sentience.