BBC Science Focus

How do parrots ‘talk’?

- HENRY WORRALL, LONDON

In the wild, parrots live in flocks and they learn to copy the ‘catchphras­es’ of their own flock, as a way of telling who belongs to the flock and who is an outsider. Scans show that parrot brains have a different structure from songbirds’, and this can help to explain why they’re so good at vocal learning.

In captivity, alone in a cage, the only vocalisati­ons available to parrots are human speech, so they naturally learn to imitate this instead.

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