What sound do pandas make? You asked Google – here’s the answer | Jules Howard

Every day millions of internet users ask Google life’s most difficult questions, big and small. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries

A great frustration for those who study natural history is that the sounds made by almost every extinct creature that ever lived will never be heard by human ears. The best we know of the call of the dodo, for instance, is that, perhaps, its name was an onomatopoeic allusion to a two-noted pigeon-like “cooo”. Likewise, the best we know of the great auk, a flightless penguin-like bird of the northern hemisphere, is that it may or may not have made a “gurgling noise when anxious”. My favourite of these extinct sounds is that of the Huia, a charming long-billed New Zealand bird which, although last seen in 1907, managed to stow its song into modernity because an elderly Maori man could remember the song from his childhood and recite it 50 years later, whistling it in front of audiences still saddened by its loss.

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When reaching their most fertile stage, bleating comes out capitalised. “I AM READY FOR SEX,” a panda may be saying

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