Parrots have been trained to speak human words, but is it really the humans training them or is it the parrot’s need to fit in? Next time you hear a parrot saying, “Polly wants a cracker”, you may like to think about the work that biologist Timothy Wright and his team are doing at the New Mexico State University.

Wright’s team has been comparing sonograms of parrot vocalizations of Amazon parrots residing in Costa Rica. They have found that all birds use a specific call to keep in touch with other members of the group. However the acoustic structure of the call differs from region to region creating different dialects.

When a parrot hears a new dialect, it will try to modify it’s own call to match the vocalization that it has heard. Wright says that learning to sound like the others is very important to parrots because when you sound like them it means that you are a member of that group.

It is perhaps this need to feel like a member of the group that has parrots in captivity trying to imitate their human families. They are trying to recreate a feeling of belonging by trying to sound like the humans when they speak with them. Now that is an interesting science project.