Asked by: Henry Worrall, London
In the wild, parrots live in flocks and they learn to copy the ‘catchphrases’ of their own flock, as a way of telling who belongs to the flock and who is an outsider. Scans show that parrot brains have a different structure from songbirds’, and this can help to explain why they’re so good at vocal learning. In captivity, alone in a cage, the only vocalisations available to parrots are human speech, so they naturally learn to imitate this instead.
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