A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, R2-D2 beeped and booped—and now birds that copy the Star Wars character are giving scientists fresh insight into how different species imitate complex sounds. A recent study in Scientific Reports analyzed the vocalizations of European Starlings and nine species of parrots, including budgies, to see how accurately each bird can mimic R2-D2’s robotic whirring.
Researchers analyzed recordings they found online of birds imitating the plucky droid to find out how statistically similar each bird’s noises were to a model of R2-D2’s sounds. The starlings, a type of songbird, emerged as star vocalists: their ability to produce “multiphonic” noises—in this case, two different notes or tones expressed simultaneously—allowed them to replicate R2-D2’s complex chirps the most accurately. Budgies and other parrots, which produce only “monophonic” (single-tone) noises, copied the droid’s sounds with less accuracy and musicality.
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The differing abilities stem from physical variations in the birds’ syrinx, a vocal organ that sits at the base of the avian windpipe. “Starlings can produce two sounds at once because they control both sides of the syrinx independently,” says study co-author Nick Dam, an evolutionary biologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Parrots are physically incapable of producing two tones simultaneously.”
It isn’t known exactly why species developed differing control over their syrinx. “Most likely some ancestor of songbirds happened to evolve the ability to control the muscles on both sides of the syrinx, and this helped them in some way,” says University of Northern Colorado biologist Lauryn Benedict, who wasn’t involved in the study. A leading explanation involves mating: the better a male songbird sings, the more females he attracts.
Some birds such as starlings (right) are better at mimicking R2-D2 (left) than others.
Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images (left); Gary Chalker/Getty Images (right)
Although the study is “a really elegant way of approaching this question of whether the starlings versus the parrots are capable of producing the same sound with the same accuracy,” it doesn’t fully address how much training or reward the birds received, says Nicole Creanza, an evolutionary biologist at Vanderbilt University, who also wasn’t involved with the research.
Benedict agrees that the researchers could work with bird owners to do tightly controlled trials. (And she and other scientists, including some of the study authors, are looking for public submissions of other examples of parrots imitating sounds for their Many Parrots Project.) “A wider sample would be really neat,” she says, “and they could test all kinds of different sounds, not just R2-D2!”