"It is not impossible, but very improbable that an African grey parrot would suddenly start saying a sentence that it has only heard once or a few times," Glenn Reynolds, U.S. Administrator of World Parrot Trust, told Discovery News, explaining that repetition can reinforce a bird's ability to learn new words and sounds.
"If anything, the parrot would likely later mimic the sound of the gun," added Reynolds, who has owned and bred various parrot species since 1979. "African greys tend to be very shy birds. A gunshot would understandably scare the living daylights out of one."
There is no evidence that a traumatic event could lead to a parrot repeating words or sounds heard in the heat of the moment, but parrots do appear to be very good at detecting human emotions.
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"It's as though they have a sixth sense," Claudia Hunka said while parrots and other talking birds around her happily vocalized in the background. She has owned the store Your Basic Bird near the University of California at Berkeley for 35 years.
"Dogs smell and size someone up, but birds can read people in an instant," Hunka said.
Both she and Reynolds said that parrots can also learn the meaning of words by association. Hunka mentioned that one African grey says, "Night night," when its cage is closed and the lights are turned off. Another yells, "Hello!" whenever the phone rings. Yet another says, "OK, OK, OK," when something upsetting happens, mirroring its owner's habit of doing so.
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There is also little doubt that parrots are remarkable mimics. Reynolds said he has heard them vocalize so they sound just like a doorbell or tires burning rubber. As a teenager his family used to watch the Golf Channel -- and their parrots got into the habit of blurting out golf statistics when the TV was off.
He said that a well-known parrot named "Groucho" sings a variety of tunes, even in foreign languages.