That's a surprisingly good overview of research into animal language.<p>I don't find it surprising at all that animals like birds, and especially primates, can learn rudimentary human language. It's reasonable to assume they label things in their natural setting. In a social species, there would be an evolutionary advantage for one member to be able to describe, for example, that they just found a new banana tree.<p>We're not special enough for language to have developed from scratch in <i>homo sapiens</i>. Our expressive language had to have come from simpler roots in other species.<p>The thing about the bird making and using tools was new to me, however. I had only heard of primates using tools before.