Steve Irwin didn’t need a translator to talk to animals. In this clip that keeps making the rounds online, two Australian kookaburras were going at each other with pecks, and he simply… imitated their sound.
Yes, exactly: he reproduced the exact call of these native Australian birds, that sound that resembles a guttural laugh. Seconds later, the two birds let their guard down. “You be friends now”, he told them, as if calming a fight with the right language were the most normal thing in the world.
Irwin grew up at his family’s reptile zoo and later founded Australia Zoo with his wife Terri. He died in 2006, but clips like this—where his connection with wildlife seems almost telepathic—continue to remind us why they called him the Crocodile Hunter.
