Aside from being accomplished architects and artists, many bowerbirds are also skilled mimics. Male satin bowerbirds will imitate the calls of other local birds during their courtship displays. Even more startling, MacGregror’s bowerbirds have been heard imitating human speech, pigs grunting, and even the sound of nearby waterfalls.
There was a Fawn-Breasted Bowerbird at the Honolulu Zoo that was very good at mimicking human conversations, to the point where you could talk to him about like, Modern Art Theory or Gothic Symbolism and he’d nod along and go “ooh” and “Mm-hm” at the appropriate parts and was actually more helpful for fleshing out ideas than some of my professors at the time.
He also clipped every single eyefeather off the Green Peacock he was sharing a cage with to make the MOST MAGNIFICENT bower for the lady fawn-breasted Bowerbird in the next cage over. She was so pleased she laid him an egg, and managment decided to let the two lovers be together (once given some birdie birth control), and the Peacock was moved in with a much less ambitious Wilson’s Bird Of Paradise.
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