The “voice” of Sparkie, a budgie trained by his New- castle-born owner in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is the oddest of some 150,000 wildlife sounds in the library’s archive.

Metty Williams, Sparkie’s owner, taught her pet to speak a variety of nursery rhymes in dialect. By the time of his death, in 1962, Sparkie had a vocabulary of more than 500 words.

“Wor little spuggy (Geordie dialect for sparrow) ran oop the wahter spoot,” Sparkie chirps on the library’s Bird Mimicry CD. “The rain came doon, and washed the spuggy oot.”

The album contains recordings of mimicry from wild and captive birds that accurately imitate things from horse whinnies to wood being sawn. Samples of the recordings are available on Times Online.

A London blackbird, recorded in 1998, can be heard imitating the tones of a modem connecting to the internet. Richard Ranft, a curator at the library’s sound archive, said that the birdsong had been recorded after an office worker had repeatedly connected to the internet with an audible modem next to an open window.

“Wild birds are mimicking so they can attract a mate,” he said. “The most popular theory is the birds are trying to embellish their songs. The more complicated their songs, the more appealing they are to their mates.”

Experiments such as a study of European starlings by Doug Mountjoy, of McGill University, in Quebec, Canada, show that birds with a larger repertoire of calls mate earlier in the year.

Some birds, such as the fawn-breasted bowerbird, are capable of highly complicated mimicry. A recording of a bowerbird in Papua New Guinea contains imitations of metal ladders, hammering, sawing, the rattle of a ball bearing inside a spray-paint can and snatches of unintelligible human speech picked up from a building site.

Wild birds more commonly imitate other birds, as demonstrated in samples of a great tit mimicking a nuthatch and a starling’s mimicry of an owl, a jackdaw and a chicken.

Captive birds use the same skill to interact socially with their human owners. A pair of bullfinches kept in the Hesse region of Germany can be heard whistling the German folk melodies Golden Sunrise and A Hunter from Kurpfalz.

Mr Ranft said that the most talkative birds, such as Sparkie, are trained from infancy by a single person. “Teaching birds to speak is not so popular now,” he said. “It has a long history. Samuel Pepys mentioned budgerigars and Geoffrey Chaucer mentioned talking birds.”

Henry VIII owned an African grey parrot that would summon boatmen from across the water at Hampton Court Palace. Queen Victoria also had an African grey, called Coco, that was taught the National Anthem by members of the Royal Family. Another African grey, named Ziggy, hit the headlines in January when Chris Taylor, its owner, heard his pet mimicking his girlfriend professing her love for another man. Mr Taylor and Suzy Collins split up after the parrot blurted out: “I love you, Gary.”

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