From: david@edenroad.demon.co.uk
On Tue, 06 Feb 2007 07:12:09 -0800, Phas wrote:
> On Jan 27, 12:11 am, David Mitchell wrote:
>
>> It's a matter of record thatbirds_do_imitatetelephonerings; and that
>> they sing in the morning ("The Dawn Chorus"). Whether this particular
>> event is due to a bird is unknown; but surely you can concede that the
>> probability of this being due to something _which is known to happen_,
>> occurring _at the time it normally happens_, is more likely than it being
>> due to something which is anecdotal at best.
>
> All right, I don't know the kind of a bird it's all about, and I don't
> live in UK so I couldn't hear it, but, to me it seems much more likely
> that telephone designers actually were imitating birds.
Not so. The phone was called a trimphone, and had a very distinctive
ring; which birds began to imitate.
It made quite a few local news programs at the time; and the "experts"
they interviewed were all quite definite about which way round it happened.
> I mean, few birds have heard a telephone ring,
Urban birds (which these were) hear them all the time.
> and the rest of them
> have learned to sing the melody just by listening to their
> colleagues ? I am not telling it is impossible, only it's hard, very
> hard to accept such possibility.
Birds learn songs from their environments - they even have local accents -
and they also learn from each other.
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