You’ve Almost Certainly Been Duped by a Bird
On a dusky evening in 2007, while completing her Ph.D., Laura Kelley was traipsing through the backwoods of Queensland, Australia, when she heard her landlady shouting for her cat. Bonnie! Bonnie! Bonnie! came the call, just as it did every mealtime. Kelley peered across the property, hoping to say hello—but the woman was nowhere to be found. Only when Kelley gazed upward did she discover the true source of the sound: a spotted bowerbird perched in a nearby tree.
The bowerbird almost certainly wasn’t intentionally messing with Kelley, or what might have been a very confused cat. But it had the vocal chops to fool her several times during her stint in Queensland—a feat that’s both impressive and discomfiting. “It was so astonishingly accurate,” Kelley, who’s now studying animal behavior at the University of Exeter, in England, told me. “On more than one occasion, I got caught out.”
Spotted bowerbirds are just one of hundreds of avian species that can, the , the , the . There are birds that mimic other birds; there are birds that mimic .
