At 09:24 AM 4/19/2007, you wrote:
>I had exactly the same occurence: a mockingbird replicating a car alarm
>sequence. An interesting factor was that it sang that call only between 3
>and 5am, which is likely to be about the time that it heard the original
>coming out of a car. So this raises the question: does the mimicing
>instinct include noting and replicating the time of day that the call was
>learned? This same mockingbird (who nested in a holly tree just outside my
>bedroom window) had plenty of other calls it used in different dayparts.
A relevant story: About 1959 the Burpee seed company offered Doc Allen and
Paul Kellogg "XX" (undisclosed) bucks donation to the fledgling Lab of
Ornithology at Cornell, if they could train a mynah bird to say: "Hello,
hello, Burpee Seeds Grow." of course, giving the mynah to Burpee then for
their shows.
Since this was clearly in the "fund raising" department, not the research
department, Allen and Kellogg imaginatively took on the project themselves,
not really consulting their resident ethology genius, Bill Dilger. They set
up a Revere Reel-to-Real recorder with some chairs festooned with re-bent
coathangers, and a continuous spliced together loop of 1/4 inch tape, on
which they recorded the proper message.
Rather than bother the guests of the lab during the daylight, they would
switch this infernal machine on every evening when they left for home, and
turn it off each morning. It was locked in Doc Allen's office, with the
caged Mynah.
That's where I came in. I lived there, alone, all night. Nobody told them
that mynahs, like starlings and parrots, are very sensitive to the SOCIAL
circumstances around a potential sound-learning experience. If nothing is
going on socially (and they DO watch and listen to US for our social
contexts) the birds usually do not bother to learn the ambient sounds. The
first 6 months' results were discouraging to the management, but quite
amusing to us. First the bird learned to talk exactly like Dr. Sally Hoyt,
who administered virtually everything in those days. It really sounded like
Sally, but talking gibberish, and so we long debated exactly what the mynah
meant, and teased Sally about it. :-D
Then it learned to emit a gugling sound, which we theorized was the sound
from the Revere loudspeaker whenever the two spliced-together tape ends
went by the heads. Everyone finally realized that, although the birds HEARD
the desired words umpty-gazillion times every night (as did I, but muffled)
nothing socially happened to connect the words to an event which mattered.
Not like calling "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." which presumably was followed
in the case of our ex-mockingbird's tiny life by the appearance of one or
more feline threats to its life.
After much more time, the mynah did manage to reach "contribution level
standards" and was shipped off, never, really, to be missed.
-- best regards, Marty Michener
MIST Software Assoc. Inc., P. O. Box 269, Hollis, NH 03049
http://www.enjoybirds.com/
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