I think y’all may have the wrong idea.
My understanding (from talking with old-timers who supposedly did this) is that the tongue is not split, but rather that the connective tissue under the tongue is cut, allowing the tongue to move around more freely. Supposedly, this allows the crow to better imitate human words.
And yes, this sounds cruel to me, too.
Well, the whole tongue business in general is ridiculous because birds don’t really use the tongue to shape vocalizations. After all, they don’t have lips to work in conjunction with the tongue.
In this respect they are very different from humans. Birds use the complex muscles of the syrinx (a special organ) at the junction between the trachea and the bronchii to form sounds, in contrast to mammals, which use a larynx at the top of the trachea.
Back in grade school, a kid in my class had a talking crow that followed him around. It could say “hello” and such. It would follow him to school, wait for recesses, hang around near or on him when he was outside and then follow him home.
The really odd thing is that the bird just started doing this on it’s own one day. It must have had a previous human, lost him, and then picked this kid as his new human. Weird.
“…Caught from some unhappy master
whose unmerciful disaster
followed fast, and followed faster
'till his song one burden bore…”
Magpies, meanwhile, don’t seem to say much of anything, in human or magpie language: We’ve got tons of them around here, and I’ve never heard an utterance from any of them. I’ll take brachyrhynchos’ word for it, of course, that they can, but it seems that they don’t often want to.
Maybe you should try striking up a conversation. Perhaps the ones up where you are are a bit shy.
Magpies are notorius for chattering, in particular those cut-ups Heckle and Jeckle.
Actually, I think most corvids (crows, ravens, jackdaws, rooks, magpies, and jays) are mimics to some extent. I even saw one site that mentioned a Blue Jay that was able to talk, although it could say only one word.
It was only those citified (read captive) magpies that ever deigns to speak to me. Their free-ranging pals would only throw corvid epitaphs my way.
I’ve never heard a Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata), to my recollection, utter a word, yet I would be surprised if they did. I have heard some remarkable mimicry, like a convincing Red-tailed Hawk call. My favorite was the sound of a radio receiver. I daily checked the territory of a radio-tagged crow, carrying said receiver which beeped pretty loudly. One day I noticed that as my receiver was going “BEEP BEEP BEEP” I could hear a fainter “beep beep beep” alternating in the woodlot. “BEEP beep BEEP beep BEEP beep…” The jay flew out calling to the beeping organism I was carrying.
Weird.
It’s not a corvid, but I can’t resist saying a little more about the European Starling. Few people realize the ordinary city starling, so often considered a pest, can be taught to talk.
This article on Mozart’s Starling describes their ability, and how Mozart’s beloved pet seems to have inspired him to compose A Musical Joke.
thanks all for your reply…broomstick, I would never do such a thing. I once raised a crow, for about 1 year, he never said a word. but then i didnt know they could talk. but red ants killed him. his name was barney…loved that bird. he was always acting silly, so when I saw him jumpping around his cage, i just smiled and said that silly bird. if only I`d known : (
Crows would talk if they had something to crow about.
How can a crow say “Hello” or any word with a consonant in it? They don’t have lips. Bird books say birds make a song that goes: [here follows the words to the song], but since they don’t have lips, they don’t actually pronounce any consonants, do they?
My kakariki (a tiny parrot) tells me “You’re a brat” all the time and quite clearly. B is his favorite sound - “big bad brat bird”; “you’re bad you’re bad you’re bad”; “You’re a bad bad bad bad birdie” are but a few of his daily chants.
His name is Brat.
He can do this because of his neuronal control over the finely musculatured syrinx that Colibri mentioned. Not all birds have both these structures, nor as well developed. But the Psittaciformes (parrots) and Passeriformes (songbirds like the starling) do. Some have neuronal development to the degree that they can easily incorporate new sounds into their repertoire. Control can be as fine as vibrating the syrinx halves differentially. Lyrebirds are perhaps the master at this.
To hear how incredible Lyrebirds vocalize, go to these two pages:
Sidney Curtis Lyrebird recordings. and
The Life of Birds recordings On this link, about two-thirds the way down, is the recording of a lyrebird mimicking a chainsaw, plus just some plain funky sounds.
The problem isn’t getting crows to speak English, but to get them to stop speaking Middle English
From: The Twa Corbies (13th? century verse)
As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies makin’ mane
And one ontae the other did say
Where will we gang and dine the day
Where will we gang and dine the day
In ahind yon oul fail dyke
I wot there lies a new slain knight
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk and hound and his lady fair
His hawk and hound and his lady fair
The Australian raven, corvus coroniodes, has no difficulty making itself understood, at least to English speakers.
Its cry is a very loud and unmistakable “Faarrkk”.
I haven’t yet worked out what it is that annoys it so much.