Four Things on the Fourth Day of the Fourth Month make a post:

[capri0mni]

1) A modern wondertale by E. Nesbit that I heard told on the radio, this morning, illustrating why she is one of my favorite writers: Melisande, or: Long and Short Division (1901)

2) The other day, I swore I heard a man whistling right outside my house, out in my yard, just the other side of my office wall. And at first, it creeped me out. It took a few more repetitions for me to realize it was a bird, but only because it was just a three note phrase of descending pitch, rather than anything that sounded like a fragment of popular song. Also, it kept coming from the same spot, as if a bird had picked a perch and was declaring his territory. If it were a human -- even a human creep who was deliberately lurking, I'd expect him him to move around at least a little bit. And besides, given the time of year, and the time of day (the height of afternoon), "Bird" is just more likely. But even after all that reasoning, it still sounded So Human -- the timbre, pitch range, interval, phrasing -- everything about it sounded like an adult male human's whistle.

Now I'm wondering if it were a mockingbird. And if it were a mockingbird who was imitating a human "voice", without actually imitating a human song, note-for-note, do mockingbirds do the same with other birdsong they "imitate," and include in their mating calls? Are mockingbirds doing with sound what bower birds do with bits of collected "Stuff," and demonstrating individual creativity?

Has anyone done studies for Mockingbird intelligence, as have been done for corvids?

3) We'll be getting up-close pictures of Ceres, Soon! *Squee!*

4) Watch this space for progress on my Camp NaNoWriMo project.

I should get back to that now. ...

Comments

[spiralsheep]

2) Starlings over here imitate all sorts of noises, from other birds to engines and phone tones, and probably human voices too for all I know. They can by very disconcerting. I heard a "muffled metallic sound of coins jingling in pocket" moving around in urban canalside bushes once and my friends all suggested it must've been a starling!

[capri0mni]

I heard a "muffled metallic sound of coins jingling in pocket" moving around in urban canalside bushes once and my friends all suggested it must've been a starling!

I imagine your friends are right. A human would have to be on hir hands and knees to be moving around down in the bushes like that, and it's very hard to jingle coins in your pocket in that position.

[spiralsheep]

It definitely wasn't anything larger than a small bird or I'd have seen it moving.

[capri0mni]

Indeed. And if it were, in fact, a tiny human, I presume the coins in hir pockets would likewise be tiny, and thus, likely inaudible to you...

*Nods*

[spiralsheep]

Oh, now I'm torn between my admiration for starlings and wanting the noise to be from the pockets of a Tiny Besuited Person of Oi.

[capri0mni]

Maybe the starling and Tiny Besuited Person of Oi are in cahoots!

[spiralsheep]

♥ I LOVE this idea! Teamwork ftw! ♥

[pebblerocker]

At another house I lived in, there was a starling living in the oak tree in front of the house. Every day my partner would come home from work and set the car alarm: "bipbip". After a while, I started hearing the car alarm "bipbip" while he was still at work. I spent a few days in confusion, wondering why he was early, looking out the window and seeing no car, until I figured out what was going on!

[capri0mni]

Heh. I still say, verily: other species have more sentience than we give them credit for.

LOL

[authentique]

Laughing at your tale about the bird whistling at you. I've never heard of intelligence research on mockingbirds. It remidns me of my (satire on) research about seagulls and autism though.

Re: LOL

[capri0mni]

Hey there!

Well, after I wrote this, I went and checked Wikipedia. And the article on the Northern Mockingbird said that, like crows, they can recognize individual human faces, and know if someone was a previous threat. It also said that their calls can fool humans ... but not so much other birds. So I think maybe I'm right that their songs are mostly about style and art.

...One of my biggest pet peeves, BTW, is how narrowly humans identify "intelligence," because the definitions usually just end up giving the person who came up with the criteria license to silence anyone that doesn't fit their "checklist," you know? And that's for other humans, too...