A talking duck?! No quacks here. According to Reuters, an Australian musk duck named Ripper, raised by humans in a bird park, was seriously recorded mimicking the phrase “You bloody fool!”
A dutch scientist reportedly found the recordings of the duck talking. Carel Ten Cate, a scientist at Leiden University, said the duck mimicking humans at all is impressive.
“To find a species quite outside these groups...in a duck, that’s quite extraordinary. So it’s an independent evolutionary occurrence of the ability for vocal learning - that’s very special,” Ten Cate said, according to Reuters.
Ten Cate published the findings in a biological research journal by the Netherlands’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Though of course, he questioned the authenticity of the recordings, it was confirmed ornithologist Peter Fullagar recorded the duck in the 1980s. Ten Cate happened to rediscover the recordings in a sound archive and he go on to co-author the findings with Fullagar.
“It’s definitely based on the human voice, even though the pronunciation is a bit odd - which might be the Australian accent, I don’t know,” said Ten Cate, according to Reuters.
Read more of this report via Reuters, and check out the findings here.
Listen for yourself via The Telegraph:
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