Parrots / Community survey

Parrot owners can contribute; species still matter

Source year 2022 · Note reviewed 2026-10-13

The authors received 898 voluntary survey responses and retained a cleaned sample of 877 companion parrots across 33 genera and 73 species after quality checks and excluding birds not reported to mimic human sounds. Respondents said sampled parrots sometimes (36%) or frequently (53%) used mimicked vocalizations in appropriate human contexts without prompting. These are caregiver reports, not independently observed events or receiver tests.

What we reviewed · Full main-text review and metadata-only dataset/privacy assessment

Full main article text, including methods, results, discussion, data-availability and rights statements, reviewed through the Europe PMC full-text XML. Official Figshare v4 API metadata and its single-file manifest were checked. The supplementary questionnaire (Appendix 1), workbook, and raw responses were not inspected or acquired.

Not yet independently reviewed by a scientific specialist.

What this does — and doesn’t — establish

Recruitment used email and social media with parrot advocacy, care, and interest groups and was explicitly biased toward birds that mimic human sounds. The survey asked respondents for their names and email addresses; although the published data item declares CC BY 4.0, the XLSX has not been inspected, so presence or absence of identifiers, consent scope, and privacy suitability are unknown. The contextual-use measure is owner-assessed, not a timestamped recording or controlled behavioral response. This dataset is not an acoustic corpus, decoded vocabulary, or validated training set.

What we can build on

A community survey can expose the kinds of context people notice, but it should not collapse caregiver interpretation into scientific labels. A Talk2Nature observation flow should preserve a time-stamped observation, the caregiver's interpretation, the source recording, and any later independent review as separate fields, with species and individual uncertainty explicit.

The next reading task

Inspect the supplementary questionnaire and exact workbook schema for field definitions, respondent identifiers, consent/privacy limits, and missingness before deciding whether any secondary use is appropriate. Seek qualified parrot-communication review of a prospective observer codebook; do not admit this owner-survey table to audio-model training.

Go to the sources

Companion-parrot mimicry survey ↗
Benedict et al. (2022), full main article reviewed through Europe PMC XML. The voluntary caregiver survey reports human-sound mimicry, including owner-assessed contextual use; it is not an acoustic recording or a controlled receiver-response study.
Companion-parrot survey data ↗
Official Figshare v4 item declares CC BY 4.0 and lists one 186,629-byte XLSX. No workbook was acquired or inspected; the paper says the survey collected respondent names and email addresses, so privacy and consent scope remain unverified.
Companion-parrot mimicry survey dataset API (Figshare v4) ↗
Official item metadata lists one 186,629-byte XLSX and declares item-level CC BY 4.0. The file has no API-reported MD5 and was not downloaded or inspected. Because the article says respondent names and email addresses were collected, the workbook's privacy and consent scope remain unverified.

Original editorial note by Talk2Nature contributors. AI-assisted, source-grounded synthesis; not a peer review or an independent replication. Linked works retain their own rights.