Comedic Impressions of the Wild

do an impression of rich Little doing other comedians? Because I don't know, because it's kind of like I imagine, there is no rich Little like at the behind all these these masks. There must be this void, and so if you try to impersonate the void, it's the whole universe implodes on itself. It's my impression of him. Well, I love impressionists, particularly good ones, because I think it's you know, one level is high hilarious, right, because you're

recognizing someone in a different context. But also the powers of mimicry are just amazing to me, and some of that rang true for me when we were talking about um Vaudevillians and people working their dummies and the ventriloquists. I mean that to me is a real skill. It may not get you a lot of dates, but hey,

it's it's good stuff with me. I think it was the movie The Trip with Steve Coogan in it, where you have the two characters that have this very long and uh and entertaining bit where they're they're they're having these this duel of Michael Caine impersonations that is one, hands down, one of the best film moments out there. It is. It's it's pretty great because there they each they're taking different Michael Kaine's from different periods of history,

different points, different films, and Michael Kaine's lifespan. They are then they also have their own individual takes and preferences when it comes to the Michael Caine impersonation and uh.

In a way, all of that nuance and all of that variety in the impersonation of a specific thing ties in nicely into what we're about to talk about in this episode, because we're gonna focus on these comedic impressionists in the wild and why animals might go into this territory, why would they do it, how they do it, And we're gonna cover some extreme mimics that you might not

have ever thought of as having this ability. Yeah, we're gonna start with birds, which you know, you're probably aware that birds use a little bit of mimicry in their birds song. But then later on we're gonna get into some other animals that may surprise you. They surprise me. Yeah, and mockingbird's car alarms. That's gonna be probably zero surprise to everybody, right, Yeah, the mocking bird is uh, it's pretty great, really, and we're talking about a very ultimately

creative bird. The vast majority of songbirds out there they learn and memorize their songs from a mentor you know, they're the father bird or another singing male. But the mocking bird takes their sounds from the environment around them. So there they may take a little bit of a bird song. Here they're listening to this bird and that bird they're incorporating into their own unique song. Or indeed, they're hearing the sound of frogs or a barking dog.

And uh, if there happens to be a a human settlement nearby, well then that just opens the door to a whole new world of artificial sounds to add to their uh unique statement. I think mocking birds are actually pretty formidable in terms of something to be feared, at least for me, because not only will they mad dog you you know, and try to swoop in, but they can sit there and and mimic a car, alarm, or cellphone or a dog. They're a little insane to me. Yeah.

We're reading this article from biotist Daniel Edelstein in an article for Bay Nature, and he said, from one spring to the next, an individual male mocking bird repeats a minimum of thirty five to sixty three of his previously heard song types, while at the same time adding more songs to his delivery. As a result, his vocal repertoire eventually grows to as many as two hundred at old age, which is up to a year. She says, So one

reason for this would be reproductive fitness. Yeah, it comes down what the what is the female mocking bird want? She wants a male that has a really awesome song, a really nice you know of a long song, a complex song. And therefore it behooves the male mocking bird to create such a song using any color, any pal available to him. It's basically the bower bird scenario where the bower bird creates this wonderful love nest out of

objects that it found finds. The mocking bird creates this wonderful love song out of sounds that it encounters in its environment, and it's scavenges from its environment right there, Like if you if you meet with me, I've got like two hundred songs of a juke box. That one over there only fifty, right, So it becomes a more appealing proposition for the female bird if that other bird has the ability to pick up tunes to add to

its arsenal of vocal awe. So that's one reason. Now, another reason that animals and nature might use it is deception, of course, yes, and of course one of the classic examples of this we we see we discussed this one before, and this is not really a bird thing, but you see a wild cat species in the Amazon. They want to eat a delicious tamarin, those little bit of monkey creatures. Yeah tamarin. Yeah, they're so cute but so delicious. I understand, Uh, you want you want to eat some of those? What

do you do? You start mimicking their sounds? Cats are of course great mimics. They manipulate us humans. Uh, the their they're they're mimicking of of of of a baby crying basically with their with their mewing and uh, and they're not above pretending to be a tamarin and it means they get to eat a nice tamarin on the other end of that song. Yeah. So when the cat in mimics and monkeys call, the tamarins are then compelled to come down from the trees and investigate what is this?

Call this my baby, um, and then boom that the cat pounces. Bottom line. In order to do this. In order who manipulate animals around you with sound, you have to have a certain amount of vocal flexibility. Yeah, we know that humans obviously have it. Bats, dolphins, we've seen this. Uh. Songbirds, though, are the masters of this vocal flexibility, that is listening

to and learning vocal cues from your surroundings. And the reason that songbirds are so good at this is that they have something called the syrings and this is the sound producing organ and it's sort of the equivalent to the human soundbox, though instead of being just right above the tricky as ours is, it is actually located at the junction of the two bronchi or air tubes leading

to the lungs. Yeah, the surnx features membranes that vibrate and generate sound waves when air from the lungs passes over them. And you have muscles to control the details of the song production in the bird. And so the more elaborate than the muscles than the more elaborate the song. Yeah, and it's amazing because think about it's sort of like having an accordion tucked in right above yours able to

produce these these really nuanced sounds. Yeah, it's easy to This is one of those things that it is easy to take for granted as a human because we have uh this uh, this vocal flexibility. We can create so many sounds. We can not only sound like each other, we can sound like we can sound like like various other creatures in nature or man made devices. I mean, we have all these books. What sound does the truck make? Room, room? What sound does the cat make? Me? Now we're doing it.

It's it's amazing. We can do just about anything. Yeah, Bobby mcpahirn, I was thinking about this, He's got to have some of the highest vocal flexibility of any human around. Yeah, if he was willing to, he could just he could eat tamarins all day. Just call him in He would be completely fine out in the wild would all right, Hey, another another thing here that could be adaptive. All right, we're gonna take a break and when we come back, we're gonna get into some of the more extreme mimics

that we find in nature. Alright, we're back. You had mentioned BBC's Life of Birds, which features a songbird called the superb liar bird earlier bird. Yeah, we get a great scene of that and Borrow stalking through the chi um and uh and in stalking the liar bird, Yeah, he is. He's actually in a dense forest in Australia, and um, it's wonderful because he's able to narrate what is going on with this lear bird, which is really rolling out the big guns in terms of its vocal flexibility.

And you see this amazing mimicry going on of not just the sounds it hears around us around it in nature, but some of the human made sounds that it overhears. Yeah, such as a camera shutter. Yeah, camera shutter that I mean perfectly imitates the camera shutter obviously heard probably the crew doing that a chainsaw, because he could hear construction going on in the surrounding area, as is the human habitats moved in on its own in a car alarm. Yes,

and twenty different species of birds. So I mean this one is like the Fonzi of birds. Yeah. The librard is either of two species of ground dwelling Australian bird. And it's interesting that, in addition to having this immense repertoire of sounds at this disposal, the male librard also has a huge, beautiful fanning tail. So they're really the full package. I think so too. That's why I say

fans of birds here. Um. Now, that would be somewhat expected, But what I probably would not expect is an Asian elephant able to mimic a human. Yes, this one really surprised me. This is UH has to do with a twenty two year old Asian elephant that lives in the Soul, Korea zoo, and supposedly the elephant has learned to reproduce five Korean words uh on hello, uh anga, sit down, no,

you will lie down, and good by placing uh. And it does this by placing its trunk inside its mouth to modulate sound, kind of like uh when you see a trumpet player put their hand in in the in the front of it, or when you see a French horn player, where of course your your hand is always

uh in the bell of the horn. Yeah. And an international team that's been studying the elephants says that this is a holy novel method of vocal production and that the trainers first noticed that the elephant was imitating them in two thousand and four. And you know it's funny is for years they probably said this elephant is imitating me, I swear to you, and people probably it's spending a

little too much time around the elephant. But I love this idea that this is this Not only is it is it reproducing this sound and mimicking humans, but it's doing so in this totally new way. For instance, I don't think I've ever seen anything like this in a like a science fiction but it sounds perfect. You know that you'd have an alien species that communicates by sticking a trunk into its mouth and and then mimicking you know,

human vocalizations well. And one of the things that they think is important here are a key factor is that it was separated from other elements at age five, very early on, and then it was just surrounded by humans, so so it inevitably reaches out. Yeah, I mean that becomes essentially it's clan. And one of the other striking things about this is that it wasn't being trained to do it. This was holy came out of it, just

completely unprompted. Yeah. Now, key though, is that that whole idea that it was was around humans, not around other elephants. And we see kind of a similar theme in some of these other animals who were going to discuss. The next of which is a bluga whale, which I was surprised they had anything to say at all and that it wasn't really dirty, because I always find them to be a particularly randy creature when I encounter them at

the aquarium. Those are the ones they're always showing off their chunk, right yeah, um, which is they're wonderful and I love to see them at our aquarium here in Atlanta because they really do glide past the US and they seemed to as though they were making contact with your eye contact. Um. But yes, sometimes they can expose themselves a bit. So let's go back to this is when research is that the National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego began to hear their bloga whale Knock saying

something that resembled out. And and what was interesting here is that not only is it saying something that resembles out, but it's it's speaking quote unquote uh and a lower octave than it's actually than the octave it uses when it's actually using its vocalizations. Yes. Eventually, Sam Ridgeway of the U. S. Navy Marine Mammal Program at San Diego recorded Knock and studied those vocalizations and came to that

conclusion that it was modulating its voice. And what you would think is that it was doing that so that it could be understood while it was mimicking. And what's interesting about that too is that it would say that when someone was in the tank with him out, get out of here. Um. But Knock made the sounds by inflating air sex to a high are pressure than he did when he would make his normal whale vocalizations. Yeah,

I know that. The interesting thing here too is that not later went on and died, but Knock actually stopped doing this vocalization stunt, stopped saying out in the late nineteen eighties, and the researchers theorizes is because he reached

sexual maturity. So there's this You get this sense that there's this this point for an animal in captivity where it's if it's not if it's not surrounded by other members of his own species, or if the in close approximity to humans, there is this period of time in which they reach out and try to communicate with the nearest organisms. Yeah, and again this is a case where it was spontaneous, so it is noteworthy for that. Yeah, they weren't trying to teach the beluga to speak and

do tricks. It just emerged and then as quickly as it emerged, it went away. Now, one of the more astounding examples to me, I think, just because of the clips, you guys have got to check this out is a harbor steal. Uh. It was actually an orphaned harbor seal pup in the Cundy Harbor in Maine, and George and Alice Swallow I picked it up in nine and took

it home with them and tried to raise it. They named it Hoover, but when Hoover got too big, the Swallows gave Hoover to the New England Aquarium of Boston. So George Swallow told the aquarium employees at the time, Hey, the seal can talk, and of course they said, I'm sure again, you're spending too much time with this animal. But when Hoover reached sexual maturity, he actually began to speak more clearly, okay, with interesting trend compared to the buluga. Yes,

And here's the part that's just so crazy. When you hear the clip with a Boston accent. I popped the cot hovid yad, so I don't think I can do about an accent? Can you do about an accent? And run through these different words and phrases that Hoover could. I don't know that I'm gonna sound like a Southie, but the seal would say, I there, how yeah, get out of here, get down, get down, Get down the

seventies right, yeah, get down, get down. Yeah. So there are actual clips that the New England Aquarium has, so you guys can check that out. But it is amazing

because it's so odd. You can't help it anthropomorphize animals who are mimicking mimicking humans in the first place, But then to hear the Boston accent, it's just another level of amazing nous Indeed, now for this, uh, this next entry, our last entry here, I want you to think back to those those Michael Caine impersonations we were talking about, because we're about to talk about goats. And what's what's interesting with goats is that they only produce a couple

of different calls. They're not a lot of there's no goat song, you know, They're the only saying a few different things. So the idea that they're they're bleed eating them out with any kind of variety, with any kind of vocal flexibility is pretty mind blowing. Who would expect this of goats? And there here to be clear too, because I'm sure everybody has seen the yelling goat clips out there. The goats that sound like humans, They are

not mimicking humans in a sense. They just happen to sound, you know, arguably like humans, but they do have accents among their own groups. And I thought this was pretty fascinating. Yeah, reading about this, uh the NPR Scott Simon interview with Professor Allan McAllen got of Queen Mary University of London, co author to study showing that goats voices change as they move from different environments. The idea here is that

it's uh. It has to group identity. It has to do with the the goats you you grew up with and uh and and took on the vocal accents off. Yeah, because they're really highly social species. And so if they get separated during the day, which is sometimes do they want to be able to find each other here each other, So it would make sense that they would take on accents, and that those accents could change too, if they change over their environment and they change their surrounding goats that

they're dealing with. And it also kind of gives us a hint about the beginnings of our own vocal flexibility in humans exactly. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're not saying that in in you know, X number of years or x thousands of years in the future, the goats will have language, but all language begins with some degree of vocal flexibility. Making this sound and making this one. This sound means this, this sound means that, and and uh. And we've also looked at the way language develops in humans.

I mean, a child's babble is you know, the baby talk. It's it's nonsense, but it's mimicry. It's a mimicry is the early stages of acquiring language. So do you want to have a Michael Kane off? Ah, let's I don't know that my Michael Caine is very good. Actually, I don't even look at each other. She little ear yo maybe mourns a little bit later. Oh god, that's awful. Yeah, I think mom, Michael Kane is maybe an earlier Michael Kane,

and it's really not very good. I used to be able to do a pretty good Sean Connery, but I had to have a chunk of apple in my mouth, and it was a later day Sean Connery, perhaps after he had dentures. I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm gonna have to work on my Michael Caine. Yeah, yeah, our our there, no, my our mine is not good? All right. So there you have it. A little inside of the world of animals mimicking other animals, animals mimicking chainsaws, and oh and

in video games. That was one of the things about the Liar Bird that I found that there are cases where Liar Birds is imitating the gunshots in a video game that it can hear um. And then you also have animals that are mimicking us, and uh, and maybe even the early stages of the goat language and then humans mimicking other humans. Yes, so you want to learn more about this and other topics you need to have on over the Stuff to Go your mind dot com.

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