If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and says what sounds like “an idiot,” it’s probably a male Australian musk duck named Ripper.
The waterfowl is believed to have learned the phrase – which may also sound like “bloody food” – from a hand-reared handler in captivity at the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, near Canberra, in the late 1980s, according to a new investigation.
Ripper also mimicked the closing of an audio door originally recorded by beiner Peter J. Fullagar in July 1987. The sounds were recently resurrected by fellow scientist Carel ten Cate of Leiden University in the Netherlands as part of his study on bird vocal learning.
According to the profile of ten Cate on her college website, she was studying vocal learning when she came across an “obscure reference” to Ripper.
“When I read it at first, I thought‘ it’s a hoax, it can’t be true. ’But it turned out to be true,” he said, according to The Guardian.