"You Bloody Fool"!

Australian birds aren’t exactly known for their use of “fowl” language – but thanks to a musk duck (Scientific name: Biziura lobata) named Ripper and the discovery of a 35-year-old recording, that might be about to change. 

Ripper’s unexpected rise to fame came when Carel ten Cate, a professor of animal behavior at Leiden University in the Netherlands, began investigating the evolution of vocal learning among birds. During his research he stumbled across a recording from the summer of 1987, which appeared to capture the male musk duck swearing repeatedly and mimicking the sound of a closing door. 

"This came as a big surprise... it remained unnoticed by researchers in the vocal learning field until now", Prof ten Cate told the university website. 

The moment was a “special rediscovery”, Cate said and which led him to contact Peter J Fullagar, the scientist who had recorded the talking bird. It was 4 years old at the time the audio file was created. 

The research, which was published Monday in the scientific journal The Royal Society, indicates that captive musk ducks appear to have the ability to imitate human speech. In Ripper’s case, the phrase he was captured repeating sounded exactly like “you bloody fool”. 

Vocal learning among most animals is an advanced trait and relatively rare, although some groups such as songbirds and parrots have demonstrated their ability to learn words from humans. 

Cate described the discovery of vocal learning in a duck species “extra remarkable”. And he is hoping the research will inspire other scientists to analyze the ducks. 

Although it is impossible to know for sure where the duck got the phrase from, it may have been language picked up from his caregiver, the report said. 

Musk ducks form strong maternal relationships because the species reproduce in small numbers – which means mothers have more time to interact with their young. This may explain why hand-reared musk ducks like Ripper, who was raised at Australia’s Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, form strong human connections with their caregivers and are more likely to mimic their behavior. 

In the study, which took around two years to compile, researchers said that they had also received reports of two male musk ducks, raised in the United Kingdom, mimicking human noises they had been exposed to, including coughing sounds. 

The male Musk Duck is the largest of Australia's ducks. And these ducks can only be found naturally in Australia.