Cameras have imitated everything from film grain to fake shutter clicks, but here’s a rare twist: a bird imitating the camera. At Adelaide Zoo, a superb lyrebird named Nova has been caught producing a spookily accurate rendition of a Polaroid instant camera firing off a shot — convincing enough that a nearby visitor spun around looking for the photographer.
That visitor, Stephanie Kothe, captured the moment on video, and her reaction says it all: “How? How do you make that noise?” Nova, apparently just warming up, then launched into a flawless kookaburra call. “Now you are showing off,” Kothe added. Fair enough.
Superb lyrebirds are Australia’s endemic mimicry champions. Roughly 80% of a male’s song is borrowed from other bird species, but their repertoire doesn’t stop at birdsong. In the wild and in captivity they’ve been documented reproducing radios, chainsaws and — as Nova demonstrates — the mechanical chatter of consumer gadgets.
According to Adelaide bird keeper Kiona, Nova’s catalogue is deep. He mimics magpies, rosellas and rainbow lorikeets, plus the laughing kookaburra and blue-winged kookaburra from inside his own aviary. On the human-made side, he does chainsaws and — the detail that should make any camera nerd grin — the click of a radio button and a Polaroid shutter. In the footage, the radio impression lands just after the one-minute mark and is genuinely worth a listen.
There’s a reason his impressions are this polished. Lyrebirds age into their talent: the older the bird, the richer and more precise the vocalizations. Nova is a 37-year-old male, which is remarkable given that wild superbs typically live only 20 to 30 years. “Nova is getting quite old for a superb,” Kiona explained.
The evolutionary logic behind all this virtuosity is pure competition. Males use complex, convincing soundscapes to court females, essentially out-performing rival males. The more layered and believable the mix — birdcalls, machinery, camera hardware — the more impressive the audition. Think of it as the natural world’s answer to a producer stacking samples.
This isn’t the first time a lyrebird has fooled human ears with camera gear. Back in 2011, David Attenborough’s Life of Birds famously filmed a superb lyrebird nailing a camera shutter, alongside a car alarm and a chainsaw. That same bird impersonated a kookaburra so convincingly that a real kookaburra nearby answered its call.
For anyone who spends their days obsessing over shutter sound design and haptic feedback, Nova is a humbling reminder: nature had the definitive shutter sample library long before any camera engineer tried to synthesize one. And unlike your phone’s fake shutter noise, you can’t turn Nova off in settings.
