Australian duck says ‘You bloody fool,’ can mimic humans swearing
In English, ducks say “quack quack,” while they say “cua cua” in Spanish. French ducks say “coin coin.”
But an Australian duck named Ripper is a little different: He calls you a “bloody fool.”
Carel ten Cate, a researcher at the Institute of Biology Leiden at Leiden University in the Netherlands, began studying the vocalization abilities of musk ducks after stumbling upon a reference in a book to one of the ducks that could mimic the words “you bloody fool.” Ten Cate told The Guardian he thought the story was a hoax until he heard a recording.
Ripper’s “potty bill” was recorded in 1987 by Australian birder Peter Fullagar. Ripper was hatched from an egg and hand-reared, and he likely heard the phrase when he was a duckling. He can also mimic the sound of a door slamming shut.
Ten Cate speculated that, though Ripper seems to say “fool” in the recording, he could also be saying “food.”
“I can imagine that the caretaker would jokingly say, ‘OK, here is your bloody food’,” he said.
Ripper is not the only musk duck known to “parrot” the sounds in his environment. A duck at Pensthorpe Natural Park in England reportedly imitated the snorting noises of a pony, and another at the Slimbridge Wetland Centre in England could mimic his keeper’s distinctive cough.
The ability to recreate unfamiliar sounds is rare among animals. Only three classifications of birds are known to do so: songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds. The musk duck is the first of its species known to mimic.
“It really fascinates me because up until this point, we only thought that very specific groups of birds could mimic, and ducks were not included in that,” Maria Goller, who researched the evolution of vocal mimicry in songbirds at the University of Nebraska, told USA TODAY. “Because ducks generally don’t learn their vocalizations. They just kind of hatch knowing what sounds to produce.”
In ten Cate’s peer-reviewed study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, he argued the musk duck may have developed its ability because the ducklings are more reliant on their mothers than other species. Therefore, their development is heavily impacted by environmental factors.
Without their mothers, ducks raised in captivity form close attachments to their caretakers and begin to mimic the sounds they make.
Vocalization, which can include mimicked sounds, is also part of musk duck mating rituals.
“Males of a certain area, they come together and then they perform their displays, including the vocalization,” ten Cate told The Guardian. “The females go there and select males to mate with.”
Goller said that mating is often a driving force behind the evolution of vocal mimicry in other bird species.
“Songbirds will use mimic sounds to broaden the bandwidth of their songs, to be able to produce sounds that are maybe higher pitch or lower pitch than any of the regular sounds that species produces,” she said. “That makes them more attractive to females, because it’s generally harder to produce.”
Ten Cate also writes in his study that the discovery may change scientists’ understanding of vocal evolution.
“The findings presented here call for a more…
Read More: Australian duck says ‘You bloody fool,’ can mimic humans swearing