You can’t have secrets when you have parrots. Even when you think they can’t hear you or aren’t listening, you have to be careful about what you say. I’ve learned this the hard way more than once.
I was a bridesmaid at a wedding about a year ago. The bride and groom had been living together for a while, so it was one of those situations where they didn’t need household themed ...

Hyacinth macaw

There was a video on Youtube some years ago featuring an african grey with the nastiest vocabulary I have ever heard. It said not only the worst of the worst words known to English slang, but it used them to descriptively detail human anatomy.

It was obvious that these words had not been simply overheard and repeated – they had been taught. The video had a gazillion hits on it. I am by no means prudish, but hearing these words said with an african grey’s perfect clarity, my jaw ...

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In my opinion, one of the things that most strongly speaks to the intellect of a parrot is the use and reworking of the words in its vocabulary. Taking two unrelated words and placing them together to form another word or phrase with an entirely different meaning is the “recombining” of words.
Many birds have the ability to put labels to the things around them  Some words are the names of objects, such as a bell. Other words are adjectives such as colors, big or small, hard ...

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I have a friend who rescues parrots in her city, sort of as a hobby and just out of the goodness of her heart.  She takes in several parrots a year, rehabs them and eventually places them into carefully...

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Umbrella cockatoos

My birds don’t talk a lot, with the exception of Libby, my quaker, who won’t shut up. The problem is, she only has one thing to say, and says it over and over until I finally have to leave the room having run out of ways to respond to “How ya doin’?”.  Still, every once in a while, one of them will come with a doozie.

I used to come home from work everyday to a familiar: “Hi. How doin’?” from Linus, my umbrella cockatoo. Now it has ...

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Blue throated macaws

This question seems to be coming up a lot recently on the birdtricks facebook page and other places I visit regularly. I appreciate that people have the good sense to ask, but it’s a very difficult question to answer without knowing the person asking it, without getting a sense of the person or what their lifestyle is. I normally spend more effort trying to talk people out of getting birds than recommending a species to them.

Owning a bird takes a lot of time and work:
Are ...

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