“He’s probably our golden attraction at the park at the moment.”
The bird, which is around 1 year old, reached the park as a rescue, too well-acclimatised with humans to be released into the wild, Lloyd said.
Usually aggressive and territorial birds, Pleakly differed from most tūī as he thrived on human interaction, so the staff decided to put him in a visitor-facing area.
“Our visitors have taught him some fantastic words and excellent phrases. He’s a bit of a laugh now, to be honest.”
His special circumstances mean he’s the only tūī at the park that mimics people.
Pleakly can say “hey buddy”, “good boy”, along with a whistle which sounds like “a little bit of a cat call”.
“He’s got probably about 10 to 15 different phrases that he says, but they say they [tūī] can remember up to about 150 different phrases.”
Guests often tell the staff he’s said phrases they haven’t heard before.
“So he’s clearly got a decent vocabulary he’s not sharing with all of us,” Lloyd said.
Pleakly’s human speech abilities were first discovered by one of the keepers when they were cleaning the enclosure.
“He turned around and said, ‘good boy’ and gave our keeper a hell of a fright.”
Lloyd said visitors are often surprised at the bird’s abilities, with staff constantly hearing stories about how impressive he is.
Why they do it
University of Auckland School of Biological Sciences Professor Dianne Brunton said having a varied repertoire and showing skills in song is important for the sociality of tūī.
Brunton said tūī are constantly pulling sounds from their environment to add to their songs, such as other birds’ calls and noises like car horns.
Young birds raised among people are known to pick up human phrases and add them to their song, she said.
“They have to learn everything, basically. And so at that stage, when they are actively learning, a lot like children, babies, they can be taught human sound. And they can copy human sounds.”
Tūī might not be commonly known as mimics because they have a wide variety in their song and constantly change what they sing, making it hard to identify specific sounds, Brunton said.
“It’s not always so easy to know which parts are mimicked and which aren’t,” she said.
Male birds are more likely to pick up the behaviour, but it is also known to happen among females, Brunton said.
