Captive Puerto Rican parrots use a different dialect

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Today the squawks, shrieks, and whistles of parrots reverberate through the rainforest of Puerto Rico. But a few decades ago, these sounds almost disappeared.

Deforestation had taken its toll on Puerto Rican parrots. In a last-ditch effort to pull the species back from extinction, conservationists began to breed the parrots in captivity.

Captive parrots have developed an entirely new dialect, a phenomenon that has not been observed before in other captive bird populations, says study leader Tanya Martínez, a conservation biologist with the Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resource's Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project.

 

After recording four populations in the field, Martínez converted more than 800 hours of bird recordings to visual displays called spectrograms. She and her supervisor David Logue grouped the calls according to their similarity.

They focused on the two most common calls, the caw and the chi that flock members exchange to keep in contact with each other. The research revealed that captive birds make caw and chi calls with at least two different syllables, while the wild El Yunque birds make entirely different calls, essentially a single syllable on repeat.

So to help the captive birds pick up the wild vocalizations, the recovery program has turned to reintroduced parrots to serve as tutors.

Source: National Geographic

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Me thinking about captive Puerto Rican parrots: 

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I just like to hear a parrot talk one time.