When 10-year-old Samuel Henderson decided to share his bird calls at a school talent show this past May, he wasn’t nervous at all. In fact, in his mind, he was playing to a much larger audience than his school auditorium.
“I’ve always wanted to share my bird calls with the world,” Henderson says. “I pretended it was the whole world watching.”
Little did he know that this is exactly what would happen. After a TikTok video of his performance went viral in August, millions of people have now seen and marveled at his incredible impressions.
In the video posted by his mom, Lori Henderson, Samuel takes full command of the stage as he instructs the audience to save their applause until the end. He then begins pulling plush toy birds out of a bag, skillfully imitating each one: hooting as a Great Horned Owl, gobbling as a Wild Turkey, and honking as a Canada Goose.
As Samuel demonstrates each bird call with astonishing precision, students murmur and giggle in delight. The entire crowd soon crescendos in pure awe as he stands back from the microphone and lets loose the screech of a Red-tailed Hawk.
@diabetic4one This is Samuel’s bird call performance at his schools talent show. He loved every minute of this #autism #birder #fypage #talent #agt ♬ original sound – lori
Samuel’s parents were initially hesitant to let him perform at the school function, unsure of how his classmates would respond. But the reception was rapturous. “It took us over 30 minutes to exit the gym due to the high fives and peers trying to get to him and compliment him on his performance,” Lori says.
The Oklahoma City youngster, who has autism, has mastered slightly more than 50 bird calls over the past six years and is always working on new ones to add to his repertoire. Henderson says he learns the calls a few different ways: studiously listening while out in the field birdwatching, playing audio clips on his iPad, and even using Audubon’s plush birds, which make realistic calls. To replicate the sounds, he carefully contorts his stomach and throat to deliver the various chirps, whistles, squawks, and other noises birds make.
@diabetic4one Requested bird calls with Samuel #kidsoftiktok #autism #birdlovers #fypage #birdsoftiktok ♬ original sound – lori
Samuel’s parents have long known their son had a special talent. “Early on, before he could speak, he would mimic the world and sounds around him, especially birds,” Lori says. “As long as we can remember, his love for birds has been present.” When Samuel isn’t outside listening and watching for birds, he immerses himself in field guides, studying and reading up on them, she says. In the past year, he and his mom started sharing his skills on TikTok, even taking bird-call requests.
Samuel can clearly remember the first time he tried to imitate a bird, while on a trip to his local zoo. His ears homed in on a unique call that he now considers his favorite. “Once, I was at the OKC Zoo, and I saw a Great-tailed Grackle standing on a trash can, and I started copying it,” he says. “That was the first bird I started making a sound of.”
The fourth-grader’s uncanny ability is so extraordinary that he can sometimes fool the Merlin birdsong app into interpreting his anthropogenic trills as an actual bird. “[W]e go out and use the Merlin app, and it does pick him up as a bird,” Lori shared with Samuel’s inquisitive fans in the TikTok comments. “It’s happened several times.”
The fourth-grader’s uncanny ability is so extraordinary that he can sometimes fool the Merlin birdsong app.
Samuel’s astounding command of bird calls highlights the wide diversity of sounds that avians can generate, though we’ve only scratched the surface of truly understanding them. Jeff Podos, a bioacoustician at University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose research helped identify the loudest bird known to humans in 2019, says scientists are still in the infancy of studying bird songs and calls around the world. “There’s (approximately) 10,000 species of birds or so, and there’s only been good studies in the way birds sound in maybe 80 or 100,” Podos says. “We’re in a giant candy store, and all we’ve done so far is sampled part of the Hershey’s section.”
Christopher Clark, a bird sound expert from the Department of Biology at the University of California at Riverside, agrees with Podos’s assessment. “We’re still in an era of exploration of bird acoustics,” Clark says.
In recent years, ornithologists have discovered that bird sounds don’t only originate from their vocal organs, but also through vibrations in their feathers during mating displays and other locomotion. Clark, who specializes in hummingbirds, says that improvements in audio-recording technology and community science platforms like eBird are helping fill our knowledge gaps, but we still have a long way to go.
Since going viral on TikTok, Samuel has kept himself busy teaching his classmates how to do their own bird calls and even got an invite to visit the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. As for his parents, they are still shocked by their son’s sudden celebrity.
“We are beyond overwhelmed by the response—so many comments and praise from birders and non-birders alike,” Lori says. “He has been recognized around our town from TikTok when out and about, and has had multiple voice actors and other celebrities comment on his talent.”
Though he has some time, Samuel is already looking forward to learning even more about birds when he goes to college, where he hopes to study them. His goal? To help advance our understanding of bird calls and sounds, of course. “I want to be an ornithologist when I grow up,” he says. “I want to study birds!”
