Bryan Keith, age 10, of South Sioux City, Iowa, for his question:

HOW DOES A PARROT TALK?

This is springtime, when the bird world has the most to say for itself. They utter a vast assortment of calls and cries and their musical songs resound through the countryside. Considering all the vocal sounds they can make, it is surprising that more of the birds do not try to copy human speech.

Hidden under his feathers, a bird has a pair of very keen ears. Hidden down in his windpipe he has a voice box, where passing air creates sounds by vibrating over little flaps of skin. You, too, have a voice box that produces sounds in much the same way. However, your voice box is near the top of your windpipe  and the sounds pass up to be molded, shaped and refined by assorted muscles and pockets in your mouth and nose.

A bird's voice box is at the bottom of his windpipe, deep down in his chest.  What's more, his cheeks and tongue are less movable and he has no teeth to mold the shape of his sounds. Nevertheless, the average bird has a sizable vocabulary and the songsters can sing with their mouths almost closed.

Many birds like to mimic all sorts of sounds they hear in the wilds. The parrot and several others like to imitate sounds uttered by human beings. They do this by breathing air through their chesty voice boxes. A parrot is such a good mimic that he often fools us. But strange to say he cannot fool the more sensitive ears of a dog.

This is because the parrot is a ventriloquist  that is, he throws words around without moving his mouth. This sounds fine if we are not paying close attention. But actually his consonants are rather blurred. When the rascal learns to call the family dog, he is only partway successful. For a moment, the dog pauses to listen, then he decides "pooh! That's only the parrot"  and goes on his way.

Some people claim that a chatty parrot has no idea of what his words mean. But modern researchers are not so sure. Their tests show that he can match the right words to the right things just about as well as a 2 year old human child.  When he says, "Polly wants a cracker," he almost surely means just what he says.