Articles & Texticles

No.1: The Macaw
(You’ll have to do what the parrot says, and click on his image.)

And yes, you’re right it is a macaw. It’s the image that started me off on a long rumination about parrots.
I found it in the astonishingly well constructed site run by the New York Public Library, amongst a few thousand scans of cigarette cards. In all, there are some 600,000 images awaiting your visit.

A few minutes after finding this lovely chromolithograph, I spotted a news item on the BBC news site that related the story of an African Grey parrot called Yosuke that had wandered from its home in Tokyo. The bird was reunited with its owner because it repeatedly squawked its owner’s name and address to the veterinary clinicians who were looking after it. Now that’s amusing enough when you watch the video showing the bird speaking in Japanese, which I think (as a non Japanese speaker) is pretty smart. But what really impressed me was the assertion at the foot of the page that claimed that African Greys are as cognitively gifted as a six year old. I presume they mean a six year old human, rather than whippet, or narwhal, but I have no idea how you’d go about measuring these things. There must be some sort of universal test that researchers use to grade animal intelligence.

Repeating their name and address is a pretty commonplace feat for parrots, apparently, and it has reunited many a bird with its owner. A parrot has to be careful to tell their name and address to the right person, however, or they might get abducted while innocently chatting to seagulls, (as you do).

It strikes me though, that whoever is making the intelligence claim on behalf of the parrots hasn’t been spending much time with six year old humans recently. I’d suggest they visit a primary school classroom and listen to the year 2 students confidently cruising through their spelling tests, and then ask a parrot to do the same.
I believe that while the children are certainly using rote memory to recall their spellings parrot fashion, they are also beginning to deploy big dollops of inference and guesswork in their spelling strategy, too.

Parrots certainly have another similarity to six year old humans, which is that they can be jaw droppingly indiscreet.
Imagine the anguish one parrot owner suffered recently when he was alerted to his girlfriend’s infidelity by his talkative African Grey squawking “I love you Gary” using her voice. His name was Chris, not Gary. Whoops!

No.2: The African Grey.

Suzy Collins had been meeting ex-work colleague “Gary” for four months in the Leeds flat she shared with her partner Chris Taylor, according to reports.
Mr Taylor apparently became suspicious after Ziggy croaked “Hiya Gary” when Ms Collins answered her mobile phone.
The parrot also made smooching sounds whenever the name Gary was said on TV.
Mr Taylor, 30, a computer programmer, confronted the woman he had lived with for a year who admitted the affair and moved out, several newspapers reported.
He also gave up his eight-year-old African Grey parrot after the bird continued to call out Gary’s name and refused to stop squawking the phrases in his ex-girlfriend’s voice.
“I wasn’t sorry to see the back of Suzy after what she did, but it really broke my heart to let Ziggy go,” he said.
“I love him to bits and I really miss having him around, but it was torture hearing him repeat that name over and over again.”
Ms Collins, 25, said: “I’m not proud of what I did but I’m sure Chris would be the first to admit we were having problems.”
Ziggy - named after David Bowie’s former alter ego Ziggy Stardust - has now found a new home through the offices of a local parrot dealer.

That couple separated without having to go through a painful divorce, but imagine what it must be like to be in the divorce court and your pet cockatoo is called in as a star witness to testify against you! To add insult to injury, the bird in this next example of parroty persiflage was named Bozo.

No.3: Leadbeaters Cockatoo.

“I knew he’d seen everything that my husband Carlos did when my back was turned,” Mrs. DeGambos said in an interview about her bizarre divorce court ploy. “And I knew he had the vocabulary to describe what he’d witnessed.

“My lawyer thought at first it was a ridiculous idea to call on Bozo, but he doesn’t know Bozo like I do.”

Incredibly, the 14-year-old cockatoo answered questions and identified photos during his testimony before Judge Manuel Agusto in a civil court here. According to press accounts, the bird tended to repeat himself but presented convincing proof that his master, a businessman, had been unfaithful.

The stool-pigeon parrot described three “pretty dollies” that Carlos, 52, had “tickled” while his wife was away. He also identified the women in photographs, calling them by their correct names.

“I used to think that Carlos was a faithful husband but Bozo let me know about a year ago that something was up when I wasn’t home,” Mrs. DeGambos said. “He was using new words, words of love. And he began giggling in a high-pitched feminine voice. He kept saying, “No Carlos, not here,” and things like that. I knew if the lawyers could get him to testify, there was plenty of information they could get from him.”

( Read the whole tawdry tale here ) You have to love that bit where the lawyer says: “the bird tended to repeat himself”. Brilliant!

I have no idea what sort of cockatoo Bozo is, but I bet Carlos now sees him like this:-

No.4: The Palm Cockatoo.

This gabby behaviour is nothing new, it must be noted.

Perhaps this story might give us an insight into a strange aspect of human behaviour. Namely, that we just love teaching parrots to swear. We just can’t help ourselves, even if there are embarrassing consequences for doing so. Nor can we resist getting them drunk. Or making them smoke tobacco. Sometimes all three. Or training them to play golf, or whistle (as if they needed training!).
It’s a strange dynamic.

No.5: The Curiously named Blue Fronted Amazon

Turning our attention away for a moment from the patient parrot who became a psychotherapist, and even the geeky parrot who had his own website and e-mail address (unreachable today, unfortunately) and the potty mouthed parrots for a while, let’s take a look at their cousins, the crows, who always seemed to me to be more intelligent. Maybe that’s because they appear to be more solemn than the garrulous motormouth parrots, but it also might be because crows seem capable of inference and abstract thought processes, not to mention tool making.

Have a look at the cleverness of the crows in the video below.

Joshua Klein talks about his vending machine for crows at the latest TED Talks. It’s an amazing presentation, as are all of the TED lectures.
(Technology, Entertainment, Design. In case you were wondering.)
Link to low resolution video. Link to high resolution video.

No.6: The Parrot Fish

Parrots are clowns. Crows are goths.