Teaching birds to sing song

[researching]

Hi
Does anyone have any interesting stories about teaching garden birds to sing songs/mimic sounds?
How would you go about this and how long does it take?
Thanks!

[burnhal]

With UK garden birds, the most likely to mimic is the starling- they will quite happily imitate other birds, telephones, dogs, cats. Dont think you could really teach them unless you have a healthy population of starlings and you wish to look a right idiot and sit repeating the same noise over and over!

[YvonneM]

A couple of years ago we had a blackbird that mimiced my neighbours telephone

[lugus]

I used to live near a starling tha timitated a car alarm. Cute till he does it at five in the morning outside your bedroom window.

[SteveD]

It's a pity the lyre bird isn't native to Europe:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=343350 7052114896375

[WendyS]

I don't know the answer to your question about how to teach garden birds to mimic sounds but many years ago we had one of those BT Trim Phones which had a particularly distinctive warbling ring tone. It was located near a window which was often open and in no time at all a couple of the local starlings were mimicing it so effectively that often when in the garden I would rush indoors to answer the phone, not realising it was a bird that was making the noise.

[researching]

Wendy, that's hilarious!
How long would you say it took for the starlings to start mimicking the sound?

[cliveminni]

As kids we had a canary and a budgie and after a while the budgie started copying the canary's song so you couldn't tell whether the canary or the budgie was singing! Not much relevance I know but it was funny at the time :)