PARSING PARROT DIALECTS AT PITT JOHNSTOWN

Christine Dahlin

The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown campus sits high above Pennsylvania’s Conemaugh Valley on more than 600 acres of a certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, full of birds and the occasional bear. Biology students, many of them first-generation college students from rural communities, create research projects studying the area’s biodiversity. But the most striking bird research at UPJ doesn’t involve native birds—it involves parrots.

Christine Dahlin, professor of biology at Pitt-Johnstown, has a lifelong interest in vocal learning in birds, specifically yellow-naped amazon parrots. Known for imitating human speech when kept as pets, their vocals in the wild are equally complex.

“I have a team of research students working on a long-running project studying the dialects of yellow amazon parrots. We use vocal recordings to study the spectrograms of the parrots—visual graphs of the sounds—and use specialized programs to develop a lexicon of the sounds,” says Dahlin. “We’re looking at what rules the parrots follow. We use vocal recordings to organize the duets between the males and females.” 

Dahlin’s team aims to learn if the birds use rules in a manner similar to human language to structure the long, complex sequences of the duets.

She also studies regional parrot dialects, traveling to Costa Rica every 11 years to document the evolution of variants. Simultaneously, she studies the health and biodiversity of the bird population. In the course of the dialect research, her team documented a steep decline in the population of yellow-naped amazon parrots in Costa Rica, which led to the International Union for Conservation of Nature listing the birds as critically endangered.

Collecting data on wild parrots is difficult, so Dahlin collaborates on a project relying primarily on citizen scientists reporting on their pet parrots. 

“Essentially, we are building an enormous database of information on the repertoire of mimicry for pet parrots. We ask people to complete a survey with data on what they know about their own pets. That way, we can collect data about a whole array of varied species that we really can’t do in the wild,” says Dahlin. “With this information, we can better understand the capacity for vocal learning across parrots, for example, African grey parrots are particularly good at mimicking human speech. Cockatiels are not good at mimicking words—but they are really good whistlers.”

If you have a companion parrot and want to participate in ongoing research, see www.manyparrots.org.