Amazing bird emulates the sound of cameras and chainsaws

A smart bird
This wild bird emulates sounds it hears including car alarms, camera shutters, and chainsaws!

This is definitely off-topic as far as technology or game stuff but it’s really cool…

A ground-dwelling Australian lyrebird (of which there are a couple varieties) does the usual bird stuff: prancing around, showing-off and trying to attract a mate. It’s this last point where it gets interesting, though.

The bird not only makes its own lyrebird specific sounds, but it can emulate nearly anything it hears and with amazing accuracy. In the video below, you can hear and see the bird reproducing other bird calls, camera shutter sounds (including with a motorized drive) and other non-nature sounds.

I suppose this is similar to how a parrot can be taught to speak, but clearly, to learn things like a camera shutter sound, this bird has the audio equivalent of a photographic memory. It must be capable of somehow mentally recording sounds very quickly whereas a parrot requires hundreds of exposures in most cases, to learn normal phrases.

One thought on “Amazing bird emulates the sound of cameras and chainsaws”

  1. Is that David Attenborough? (not sure if that is how you spell his last name or not)

    He sounded very familiar…I have a video series by that guy when he was younder and it sounds just like him.

    If it is him, he has some great and interesting nature videos out.

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