Princess Yellow Feather doesn’t have a record deal, she’s a yellow-naped Amazon parrot. But she does have an incredible ability to mimic human song. Like in the video above, where she sings “Everything is Awesome” from The LEGO Movie, ensuring that at least the next 14 seconds of your day will be awesome as well.
At the pet store Birds on Safari in Stuart, Florida where she lives, PYF also moves customers with Celine Dion’s “All By Myself”. She’s got great vocal range, and maybe a future slot at the Luxor.
Yellow-naped Amazon parrots are popular in the pet trade, which likely has something to do with their impressive ability to mimic human speech and song. Like their incredibly intelligent and equally vocal relatives the African grey parrots (seen here singing SpongeBob because why not), the Amazon parrots are deft social learners, able to mimic human speech simply by listening to their environment like they would from other birds.
There are limitations to bird “speech,” of course, as birds lack both vocal cords and lips, but some avian dinosaurs like the common parakeet have been known to amass massive vocabularies nonetheless. A blue parakeet named Puck was heard chirping 1,728 different words and phrases, for example—which the 1995 Guinness Book Of World Records duly noted.
Mimicking human speech is probably the feat that gets the most attention, but the undisputed master of sound mimicry in birds may in fact be the lyre bird. Learning from its encounters with photographers and loggers, below you can hear it sounding like everything from a camera shutter to a chainsaw:
Everything really is awesome.
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IMAGE: “Amazona auropalliata -captivity-8” by whiskymac – flickr. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
