There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, “just blow us away.” We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different ways to make up new words; that is, to demonstrate evidence for segmentation. He babbles at dusk, producing strings like “green, cheen, bean, keen”, so we have some evidence for this behavior, but we need more solid data….He finally gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, “Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh.” —‘That Damn Bird’ (Edge)

Polly wanna freak you out! **Awk!**