From what I learned in linguistics class, animals understanding human speech is not possible. It's just imitation. Scientific study of the bird will convince me. A bunch of people standing around saying "Wow, that's cool" is proof that people are easily impressed, if anything.

When something "stuns scientists" it always makes news, for some reason. As if people secretly just want to prove all the scientists wrong for some reason, out of spite or something. Seems stupid to me.