During my morning walk, I heard an infant crying from a house fifty feet away from the road. Within seconds, I heard the same sound above my head, looked up and saw this bird sitting on a power line.
This bird, Greater racket-tailed drongo (Dicrurus paradiseus), is a member of the Dicruridae family, and is skilled and interested in vocal mimicry, like parrots and mynas. When I searched Wikipedia, I learned that these birds, which imitate the sounds of other birds, sometimes imitate human voices, mistaking them to be of other birds.
This is the largest bird in the Dicruridae family and is aggressive, often attacking larger birds in groups, especially during nesting. The subspecies seen here is Dicrurus paradiseus paradiseus. Both the species and the subspecies were first described by the Swedish physician and zoologist Carl Linnaeus in 1766.
– Vincent Vanur
