Can Starlings mimic speech? (2 Viewers)

[Mabel]

The thread title pretty much covers it.
I'm not talking about the Mynah starlings, I'm talking about the Common Starlings. If (VERY hypothetical) I got a hand-reared Starling, could it learn speech? They are very good at imitating my car alarm and generally make odd but interesting noises...
Just a thought...

 

[showaddy]

The thread title pretty much covers it.
I'm not talking about the Mynah starlings, I'm talking about the Common Starlings. If (VERY hypothetical) I got a hand-reared Starling, could it learn speech? They are very good at imitating my car alarm and generally make odd but interesting noises...
Just a thought...

It could mimic speech.

But you ask "could it learn speech?" and that's a whole different thing.

When birds mimic speech they are only mimicking a sound as heard. I heard a starling once which mimicked a shepherd whistling and calling to his dog - the starling clearly mimicked the words "lie down" and "come by". But it was only repeating sounds it had heard, and was not using speech.

One step further from this would be to train a bird (I've seen it done with parrots) to mimic a spoken request for food (Give me a nut!), and then reward it with food. But the bird is still only mimicking a sound, and I do not think you could really claim it had learned speech.

First catch your starling . . . . .

 

[ermine]

If (VERY hypothetical) I got a hand-reared Starling, could it learn speech?

Yes. Proof, assuming we can trust the integrity of the website owners which I have no reason to doubt, is here
The Starling is not capable of low frequencies - you can hear that in the way it has difficulty with vowels such a o and u. A sonogram shows little energy in this recording below 1000 Hz, where human speech goes nearly two octaves lower.

Of course, whether you should do such a thing in Europe is a different matter. Starlings are native here, unlike in America where the website owner is based, where they are regarded as vermin.