SDSAB staff dude Colibri tells us that vocal imitation is found in three bird groups: [del]dolphins[/del] songbirds, parrots, and to everyone’s great surprise, hummingbirds. (Seems like something Colibri ought to know.)
Uh, yeah. I’m thinking that a lot of us Dopers are wondering just what kinds of sounds hummingbirds can make. Can they really produce some semblance of human speech, or other elaborate noises like car alarms and Presidential candidates? The only sounds I can remember ever hearing from a hummingbird are creaking sounds like a rusty gate hinge, and not very loud either. Did you ever do this project, Colibri? How many intelligible words can Alex, the African Grey Hummingbird learn?
(Okay, I see there’s already another thread in response to this same article, but that one seems to be focused on the question: How far back into birds’ dinosaur ancestors can vocal mimicry be traced? So I suppose my question should go into a separate thread.)
(ETA: Yeah, dolphins do vocal mimicry too. Really! Sort-of.)
I would expect that hummingbirds’ voices would be far higher-pitched than ours, just based on their size. So while they might be able to mimic something, it probably won’t be us.
Though, who knows? That rusty-hinge sound might be a perfect replica of the upper overtones of Kenneth Branaugh doing Hamlet.
I’ve only heard ruby-throated hummingbirds make three sounds:
A short highish pitched single chirp.
A raspy whir when flying by me near the feeder.
A pretty decent “thud” from slamming into another hummingbird.:eek:
Crows, OTOH, are fairly decent talkers. The article, unfortunately, doesn’t mentioned this explicitly. Just giving the overly-broad category of passerines.
I doubt I can find a citation for this, and this information came for one of those lil’ books they sell at pet stores “How to keep budgies from dying”.
This booklet claimed that these birds who could be trained to talk were very social, they will naturally communicate with each other. So, if you want your bird to talk, you need to keep them from other birds. This way, the bird will instinctually try and communicate with you. If there’s another bird about, then they will communicate with them.
I’ve noticed that about birds that talk … they’ve been kept insulated from other birds and have no choice but to talk. I hope the PETA types don’t get nose-bleeds reading this …
Interestingly, songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds all share a similar brain structure that seems to be connected to vocal learning.
On another note (pun intended), contrary to that article it has now been found that songbirds and parrots are quite closely related, which could account for their similar learning abilities. However, hummingbirds are still thought to be only distantly related to those two groups.
I guess this wouldn’t happen if you had a pet hummingbird.
Here’s a news story that appears to be involve a husband/wife murder / attempted-suicide, with a final argument in which the husband pleads with his wife not to do it, all witnessed by Bud the African Grey Parrot.
Now the parrot is replaying the argument, even including mimicking the parties’ voices, and there is some question whether a parrot can be a witness. I wonder how one would cross-examine a parrot.
Surely, the parrot is either a witness, or an exhibit of evidence. Either way, it will be very helpful for the prosecution’s case, though of course the rules would be different depending on what it is.
But it seems to me that there’s precedent (even if only very old ones) for an animal being a witness at trial.
There were hummingbirds nesting in a tree outside the house I grew up in, in the SF Bay area. In mid-morning and midafternoon, they would do a call that sounded like this:
chee chee chee chiree chiree chub
chee chee chee chiree chiree chub chub *
I have heard it from them many, many times since, all over the bay and east bay. They will even respond – if I whistle the first line, they will answer with the second.
In the early 90s, when people of every stripe were far more approachable to casual inquirers on the internet, I wrote to an ornithologist of some kind, asking about hummingbird song, and he wrote me back saying that hummingbirds don’t sing. Maybe fifteen years later, I ran across a paper by an ornithologist specializing in hummingbirds. I wrote her, and asked her about the call that I had heard, and whether the previous guy’s statement was correct. Was I just imagining this?
She wrote me back the nicest letter, saying that they do indeed call, and what I heard was a typical song for that kind of hummingbird.
That being said, I have to wonder about the case with the African Gray witness. Not about the bird, but about the case. Why is there any doubt about this case at all? The article says that the woman is accused of shooting her husband (fatally) and then herself; she survived. Was she not found with a gun in her hand, next to her husband who was killed by a shot from the same gun? The article doesn’t explicitly state this, but how could it be otherwise? I guess even in an open-and-shut case, you have to have a trial. Just seems weird that someone would try to deny it.
this bears no relation at all to the CHEE bird I have posted about previously. I’m just sayin’.
Well, we have it from Colibri that hummingbirds do vocal mimicry. This would appear to be an attempt to do Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins.
I’d guess that the African Gray Parrot would have to be treated as evidence, not a witness. You can’t ask it questions, and you especially can’t cross-examine it. You can’t even, probably, get it to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. As for how obvious this murder is, based on what we read in that story – well, you can’t believe anything just because you read it in the Main Stream Media any more.
Here is an article about a dog that appeared as a witness in a murder trial in France, Sept. 2008. When confronted with the murder suspect, the dog barked furiously.
This article, 2014, lists five times animals were “witnesses”. Two of them are the same two cases mentioned in the above cites; one is another parrot case; one is a cat with blood on its fur (this clearly falls into the Evidence rather than Witness category), and one was a silly case of a cat called to jury duty because its owner might (or might not) have listed it as a family member on a census.
I was looking for “very old” cases like Chronos mentions, but I didn’t find anything like that. I was picturing something like this happening in ancient Rome (Your honor, the prosecution now calls Incitatus to the stand), or something from a medieval trial. Seems like there were lots of cases of animals being put on trial, though.
The weird thing about birds vocalising is that they can often approximate a very low-pitched sound by producing a modulated series of higher-pitched clicks or very brief chirps.
My only experience of this is with budgies (parakeets), which are not as small as hummingbirds obviously, but still pretty small birds. They could mimic the deep voices of male humans - the mimicry always sounded croaky as opposed to deep and resonant, but it was definitely an approximation of a low note.
The very old animal-witness case I seem to recall was from medieval England, and involved a dog growling at the accused. I think the dog was named Killer or Fang or some other violent common noun. But that’s not very much of a memory to base a search on.