REAL TALKER

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 310, 22 March 1928, Page 10

REAL TALKER

FINCH WITH 300 WORDS

Polly (who usually wants a cracker) must take a back seat. Heretofore the parrot has reigned supreme in the kingdom of feathered creatures as the pere of all linguists. Now comes Dr. William M. Patterson and his associates, who are doing research work at Columbia University, with the claim that they have discovered the most voluble of all birds.

Even the most clever of parrots is restricted to c few phrases. The African finch, alleges Dr. Patterson, has a vocabulary of 300 words based on an alphabet of 24 letters and symbols. Many a child of three years is not so well equipped. In discussing his remarkable finch from Africa, Dr. Patterson, incidentally, explodes some fallacies concerning birds. He says: “Contrary to the popular belief, a bird does not sing a little song when it opens its beak. Instead, it makes a little speech. These speeches arc not a repetition of the same word time after time, either. Take tti little finch that I have, which I have been observing. He will say a word, land then he will not use the same j word again for a week. It has been a most instructive and fascinating work to watch this little bird, which is a small grey creature about the Asked by what method he had recorded the various sounds that com pose the bird’s alphabet. Dr. Patterson admitted that it had been doiuentirely by ear. “Mechanical methods,” he explained, “will not record the fine differences in pitch in thvarious notes'used by the bird.** In the case of human beings ami mammals generally, the voice is produced by the vibration of the vocal chords or membranes stretched on the firm cartilages of the larynx at the upper end of the -windpipe. In birds, however, this is not the case. The vocal organ is at the lower end of the windpipe, where it forks td send a branch to each lung.

In general, three different sorts of vocal organs, or syrinx, may be distinguished. In the majority of birds, the vocal equipment consists of the lower end of the windpipe, and the two branches. Several of the lowermost rings, of bony or cartilagenous construction, which compose the wil lpipe, fuse to form a more or less so T . :,i tube, while the uppermost rings, instead of being complete, are open, the gap being filled by membrane.-. It is the vibrations of these menp branes which produce the voice of 'the bird.