A rose-breasted galah named Cookie has reportedly cycled through seventeen distinct vocalisations — including one nobody on Earth can explain — at the Dubbo Show poultry pavilion, leaving judges shaken and at least two attendees reconsidering their life choices.

DUBBO, NSW — It started, as these things often do, with a bird doing something a bird absolutely should not be able to do. At approximately 11:40am on Saturday, during the open judging portion of the poultry pavilion at the Dubbo Show, a domesticated galah named Cookie — entered by retired Narromine schoolteacher Gerald Prout, 71 — began cycling through a repertoire of vocalisations that witnesses describe as ranging from ‘impressive’ to ‘deeply upsetting’ to one description I will get to shortly that has not left me since I first heard it. Twenty-four people were present. Several of them are still thinking about it.

According to the show program, Cookie was entered in the Companion Bird — Psittacine category, a class typically dominated by corellas doing passable impressions of screen doors and the occasional sulphur-crested cockatoo that knows one swear word. Cookie, it seems, had other plans. The galah — described by Gerald as ‘a very clever girl who picks things up fast’ — opened her set with standard fare: a microwave beep, a dog bark, what witnesses agreed was probably a reversing truck. Then things escalated.

Community Notice

Seventeen Calls, One Problem

Poultry pavilion judge Maureen Felts, a woman with thirty-one years of show experience and what she describes as ‘a very high threshold for the unusual,’ was positioned directly in front of Cookie’s cage when the galah reached her seventeenth vocalisation. Calls one through sixteen, Maureen tells WTC, were identifiable — she placed them as two distinct dog breeds, a kookaburra, a child laughing, something mechanical, and several that she suspected were impressions of other birds mimicking other birds, which she noted was ‘showing off, frankly.’ It was the seventeenth call that stopped the pavilion.

It was like a man apologising from the bottom of a very deep well. Not shouting — apologising. Quietly. Like he knew it wasn’t going to be enough.

— Maureen Felts, Poultry Pavilion Judge, Dubbo Show

I spoke to Basil Prout by phone on Sunday morning. He was, by his own admission, ‘a bit rattled but mostly proud.’ He told me he’d had Biscuit for eleven years and that she’d always been a mimic — picked up the school bell during his last year of teaching, still does it at 3:15pm every weekday without fail. He said he’d noticed the new sound about six weeks ago, after a weekend he’d spent camping alone on his property near the Macquarie Marshes. He didn’t think much of it at the time. He is thinking more of it now.

She didn’t learn it from me. I don’t make that sound. I’ve tried and I can’t. I’m not sure a person can.

— BASIL Prout, Retired Schoolteacher and Biscuit’s Owner, Narromine

What the Witnesses Agree On

The twenty-four witnesses present are largely in agreement on the facts: the sound was low, resonant, and unmistakably communicative in quality — meaning it didn’t sound like random noise, it sounded like something trying to say something. Several described a sensation of ‘pressure behind the ears.’ One witness, a teenage boy who had wandered in from the show rides to escape the heat, reportedly said ‘what was that?’ and then left without waiting for an answer, which honestly strikes me as the correct response. Cookie, for her part, did not repeat the call. She ate a piece of cracker that Basil offered her and then said ‘good girl’ to herself, which is something she apparently does.

Maureen Felts, who is not a person given to drama, still awarded Cookie second place in the Psittacine category, citing the overall quality of the mimicry program and noting in her written comments that ‘breadth of repertoire is impressive, though one vocalisation gave this judge pause and will require further reflection.’ First place went to a rainbow lorikeet from Gilgandra named Chips who does an extended impression of a dial-up modem, which under any other circumstances would be the story. Cookie’s ribbon is pink. Basil has it on the fridge. He says Cookie keeps looking at it.

WTC will be following this story. I have already called Basil back once to ask if Cookie has made the sound again. She has not. I asked him to call me if she does. He said he would. I am going to be honest with you: I am not sure I want him to call. But I told him to anyway. That’s the job. This is Daryl, reporting for WTC — What The Cryptid? — from somewhere quieter than that pavilion, and I hope it stays that way.