We know parrots can talk, but do they give names to their children?
I'm Lucie McNeil and this is National Geographic On Assignment--- your link to thousands of our Nat Geo Explorers around the globe.
Today, we're off to the wilds of Venezuela.
National Geographic's Karl Berg and his team spent months recording the sounds of green-rumped parrotlets.
The team was able to identify slight variations in the calls that parent birds used to communicate with different offspring.
The baby birds appear to recognize and learn the individual calls used specifically for them.
If the fledglings were learning their contact calls directly from their parents, then this would be the first example of a non-human species teaching acoustical communication.
That's National Geographic On Assignment---your link to our Explorers.
