What a Bird!

Larry the grey butcherbird has been having trouble from the new pied butcherbird group just up the road. When everyone else had been fed and had gone away, I sneaked out into the yard to look for Larry and the other grey butcherbirds.

About 50 yards from the house, I heard Gitie call me by my nickname. Looking around, I saw the door of the house was closed and Gitie was nowhere to be seen. I turned back and kept walking, then I heard her call me again. Again I looked - she wasn't there. So I stopped and looked all around me very carefully, and finally, I heard it for the third time, right next to me, and there on the fence beside me was Larry!

What a remarkable bird! Years ago he came out of his territory to protect us against a snake, and he's not only brave and true, but ever so clever too! Just think: not only can he imitate a human voice, but from the few times he has heard Gitie call me by that name, he was able to analyse human sentences and pick out the name from all the other words, and also know which person to use it on. What he could not do is also interesting: he imitated Gitie exactly, which was why I was so confused. In other words, he could not tell the syllables the word was made of. Another human, for example, would say the same word in their own voice, they would not try to imitate the voice of the person who told them the word. But Larry didn't understand human language syllables, so he just copied the entire wave form, and did a near-perfect imitation of Gitie in the process. But it worked! If we weren't mighty impressed with Larry already, he sure has impressed us all over again.