Budgerigars can identify spoken sounds without prior exposure to human speech

Like people, the birds 'trade' vocal cues to distinguish 'd' from 't' 

Date: May 31, 2017
Source: PLOS

No experience with human speech is necessary for budgerigars to perceive the difference between "d" and "t," according to a study published May 31, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mary Flaherty from The State University of New York, Buffalo, USA, and colleagues.

The debate over speech perception is unresolved, with some evidence supporting a speech-specific mechanism and other evidence supporting a general auditory mechanism. The latter case holds that, in the absence of extensive experience with speech, there should be no difference between speech and nonspeech perception. To investigate this scenario, Flaherty and colleagues used budgerigars, vocal mimics that are similar to people in their ability to perceive consonant and vowel tokens. The researchers divided 25 budgerigars into groups before hatching, raising some in complete isolation from human speech and others with extensive exposure to human speech.

After the birds fledged, the researchers trained them to peck keys in response to synthetic speech sounds that began with "d" or "t." Then they tested the birds' perception of speech sounds that varied in two cues: voice onset time and the frequency of the first formant (formants are resonating frequencies of the vocal tract). For comparison, they likewise tested the perception of speech sounds in 25 people.

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You Will NEVER Believe What Comes Out Of This Bird's Mouth. WOW

This is Disco the Parakeet. When I first saw this video, I thought it was fake, but it turns out that it’s completely real. Disco has been featured on The Today Show and is quite famous! He knows how to say close to 100 phrases including favorites like “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,” “What seems to be the problem, officer?” I’m completely speechless.. unlike Disco 

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Half-siders: A tale of two birdies

Also known as "halfsiders" or tetragametic chimæras, these unusual birds are actually two genetically distinct individuals -- twins -- fused into one being.

I recently stumbled across a video that has been attracting quite a bit of discussion. This video shows a captive-bred pet budgerigar, Melopsittacus undulatus, that is half green and half blue, and the colours are split down the middle. This bird is composed of two distinct individuals fused into one living, breathing being. Yes, you read that correctly. Although this phenomenon is rare, it does pop up often enough amongst captive birds that aviculturists have given these strange birds their own name: "half-sider".

This video is interesting but the narrator's script is quite melodramatic and contains a number of factual errors, which was my impetus to share it with you:

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