A duck in Australia has learned to do more than just quack and developed a particularly unique call.
‘Ripper’ the musk duck learned to mimic his caretaker’s catchphrase exclaiming “you bloody fool”, just like a parrot.
The ‘talking bird’ was hand reared by humans at Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, around 25 miles from the capital of Canberra.
His baffling talent was captured in a voice recording in the eighties and verified as ‘duck speech’ almost four decades later.
Professor Carel ten Cate, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, tracked down the clips and the man who made them, in a bid to verify the quackers claim.
His research confirmed that musk dusks have comparable learning abilities to other mimics such as parrots.
“I was amazed. I was really amazed,” he told The Scientist magazine.
“I thought ‘is this a hoax?’ I couldn’t believe it. It is so unexpected from a species from this group, which is considered quite primitive.”
Ripper is of the only waterfowl species known to be able to learn sounds from other species, an advanced trait among animals.
Musk ducks live in large groups and males learn the typical high-pitched whistles from their older flock mates.
However, Ripper was reared without these influences and instead replicated the human-made sounds it heard in its formative weeks.
This included included doors slamming, humans coughing and speech plus the caretaker’s frequent cries of “you bloody fool”.
It is not known who reared Ripper after all paperwork related to the nature reserve was destroyed in bushfires in 2003.
However, one scientist did look into the claims at the time and visited the area in the late eighties.
Dr Peter Fullagar, now retired, joined Prof ten Cate in revisiting the research from July 1987, when Ripper was four years old.
A Sony Walkman Professional cassette recorder and a Sennheiser MKH816 microphone was used to capture the sounds Ripper was making at the time.
This time, in order to gain a response from Ripper, Dr Fullagar stood very close to it prompting the bird to call out and scramble along the bank.
The scientist concluded that the vocalisation was “most likely an imitation of a phrase he heard repeatedly from his carer.”
The new findings were published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
