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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Back before the iPhone when Nokia was the defacto phone, there were news stories that birds had started to chime the Nokia ringtone or the Nokia sms chime.

Back then I totally believed it, but I’ve grown skeptic, but it looks like it is not completely outlandish.

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I had an Alcatel One Touch Easy and One Touch Max. Both had high chirpy tones and powerful speakers.

My budgerigar have learnt that I always responded to SMS tone of the phones and started to mimic them when she wanted some time with me. She did them with pinpoint accuracy so, it was impossible to tell whether it was the phone or her.

She also chirped parts of the ringtones for fun. Also we had a tune between us. I'd whistle a specific tune and she'd respond back with the same tune (or vice versa). It was a kind of pinging each other.

That last bit is so cute :)

Thanks. She was very intelligent and very loving. :)

My mother told me when she was a kid they used to whistle melodies at birds and some repeated them after a while. Especially starlings.

I'm surprised McDonald's haven't tried teaching birds to whistle their melody, free advertising

Except all the work in training the birds...

That part might be cheap. Still gotta feed and house them while they learn.

I had a bird fall in love with my phone's alarm ringtone that I was using in the mornings, started singing back to it, and tried dangerously to enter my dryer vent presumably to mate (or "rescue"). When I finally put all that together I realized that I probably was sleeping too far into that ringtone's repetition cycle and that it was definitely time to change ringtones.

There's a hardware store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn near where I used to live that had a bird in the store, and it frequently did cell phone ring tones, cash registers, etc.

I thought that kind of exact copying was relegated to mockingbirds but this guy just looked like a parrot.

I remember hearing nokia ringtones sung by birds while waiting for at bus stops in the late 90s

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