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Re: Interesting Article - "Singing In The Brain"

Subject: Re: Interesting Article - "Singing In The Brain"
From: "Marty Michener" enjoybirds
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:58 am ((PDT))
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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