Mini Caller Why do parrots talk?

Though a parrot might not understand any words it's saying toward you, there's a good chance its aim is to address you individually, new research suggests.
A study indicates that at least some parrots' talent for mimicking sounds, which underlies their "talking" skill, functions in nature to let them communicate with individual parrots they encounter.
Thorsten Balsby of the University of Aarhus, Denmark and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen studied one parrot species, the orange-fronted conure.
In the wild, these birds live in dynamic flocks where individuals flit in and out, so each parrot encounters many different individuals daily, the researchers noted. Each bird also has its own unique call.
Both in the wild and in the researchers' experiments, parrots that heard an imitation of their own calls responded more often and faster to the calling individual than parrots that didn't hear this imitation, according to the scientists.
Based on these observations, they suggest that the parrots may have evolved their abilities as mimics so they could start "conversation" with a specific individual by mimicking their call. The findings were published Nov. 21 in the research journal PLoS One.
"Given that orange-fronted conures frequently communicate within large communication networks with many potential receivers, which may be from several different flocks, the ability to selectively address specific individuals may be of particular importance" to them, the scientists wrote.