Our pet rat is making funny noises can you help

he almost sounds like a pigeon making short quick cooing noises. otherwise he is acting normal. can someone shed some light on this for me? is it possible that he has a cold?

Any vocalization that we humans can hear is cause for concern. Rats normally "talk" in a frequency that is beyond our hearing capacity.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bclee/rat...

The vocalizations that we can hear usually expresses fear (squeak), alarm (shriek), anger (hissing), or illness (moaning, cooing, wheezing, guinea pig grunting, clicking). Even bruxing (gnashing the teeth), akin to a cat's purr, and a sound that we like to hear when our rats are happy, can mean both contentment, or discontentment. Rats brux when they are ill to help themselves feel better.

http://www.ratbehavior.org/norway_rat_vo...

Unfortunately rats do not get a simple cold. They get Mycoplasmosis

http://search.yahoo.com/search?search=my...

Pet rats are born with the pathogen already in their nasel passage and lungs. Stress of any kind, even aging, or being lonely, will cause a flair-up and these flair-ups come and go for the rest of their lives.

If your rat is still acting normal, and a rat can live for a very long time with Myco, you have more then likely caught the disease in the early stage when it is still in the nasel passage and easier to control. Once it goes down into the lungs the rat will get pnuemonia which is much more difficult to treat.