Their linguistic prowess is limited but hilarious.
My bird knows probably a dozen or more human vocalizations and their rough usage. He has maracas that he likes to fiddle with and sometimes he will tap it against his head, which makes it rattle, and he will say "stahp eht"(stop it). He has a hatred of things that rattle or jingle and he loves to destroy things to make them stop. He is trying to tell the maracas to stop making noise that he causes. He will approach a toy that rattles and will say "stahp eht", and then pick it up or knock it about as if telling it to not make noise will make it not make noise; entirely absent is the concept that he is causing it to make noise.
It is quite funny to be told by a 63g bird to "shaddap" when the TV is too loud for him to sleep in his covered cage at night.
I do wish he would use "bed tyme" more appropriately for when he wants to be put to bed and not just whenever he wants to take one of his 6-10 naps a day. Close enough for an Amazonian Hitler pigeon with a final solution to the rattle and jingle question, I guess.
He unfortunately is paranoid, skittish, and believes a phone can steal his soul; so recording him doing cute stuff is nigh impossible. If I can catch him in the act and remember, you'll get delivery.
I used to work at a pet store.
Being someone who loves animals, I tried to make sure the parrots(conures) got plenty of socializing to help make them better pets and to meet their social needs to prevent them from developing bad behaviour and mental issues. Luckily our location didn't sell many, probably because we made sure people understood that they are toddlers with a nutcracker for a face and how much of a responsibility they are, so I could spend a lot of time with them.
The bird I ended up taking home had a great personality and was fairly well behaved. While he was still merchandise, I would have him out for 50% of my shift. He wasn't a fan of most women and didn't really spend much time with the other dude working there, so I was his best friend.
We wore polos and my hair was long at the time so he would love to crawl under my hair and sleep between my collar and my neck. The only indication that he was there was his crimson red tail sticking out a couple inches from behind my head. His preferred resting place was not a problem because he was secure and I could still do all of my work responsibilities without having to consider him.
When he was all rested he would crawl out from my hair and socialize. His napping place was quite the surprise when I was talking to a customer and a bird would appear out of nowhere and say "Hi!" with an upwards inflection.
He also liked to sit in the crotch of the open button fly of my shirt with his back to my chest. I think he just liked to see what was going on and that spot was more warm and secure than my shoulder. He would sometimes crawl out from under my hair and then slip into my collar and pop his head and chest out to get into his observation post.
Imagine talking to the guy at the pet store and a suprise bird slithering out from behind his head and into his shirt, coming halfway back out and greeting you. More than a few customers would pause mid sentence or lose focus on what I was saying when he did that, derailing the conversation about everything else so the bird became the topic.
As you can imagine, he was very attached to me. He was so acclimated to the store environment and felt so safe with me that he wouldn't fly off in fear no matter what noises he heard. I could grab him off my shoulder and throw him in a direction, he would fly right back to me like a boomerang. I would let him stand on counters and when I would walk away he would fly right to my shoulder.
He wasn't happy when I shaved my head and made sure to express his loss of hiding spot by getting all poofed up and babbling angrily when I took him out that day. He pretty much only stayed in my shirt after that.
I eventually took him home. I got him for half off by abusing the hell out of my employee discount and coupons, still spending half of my meager paycheck on him and the rest of my check on a small cage, supplies, and an assortment of toys for him to destroy. On the car ride home he got carsick and shook his head violently, spraying bird vomit all over the side of my head and speckled about my car's interior. It wasn't a great start to our cohabitation, but it was how it started.
I was a young man and that bird learned to curse after I took him home. While my current bird shows my maturation by telling me to "shaddap" when I am too loud after his bedtime, that first bird would tell me to "Shat tha fuck up!" with a clear tone of agitation. Being cursed out by a bird because I laughed too loud after bedtime humbles a man like a parent yelling at you for waking them up when they have work tomorrow during your summer break.
He eventually died after $2,100 in bird specialist vet bills and weeks of unknown illness, we had 12 years of good times and incessant snuggles.
Those are some great stories, thanks for sharing. Imagining him coming out and saying hi made me smile
I’m assuming you’ve done a pirate costume at Halloween for at least one of the years you had him
Actually no, I've never been one for Halloween and taking him outside the house or giving him the potential to explore outside freely without my consent would be irresponsible.
Also judging how he felt that most hats were trying to harm me, resulting in him unleashing his tiny fury upon the hat and my head/face, I doubt a tricorn would have been well received. I took a pretty vicious bite to the lip when I wore a bucket hat around him; I took his harsh fashion critique seriously and never wore one again around him.
Birds can have weird hatreds of things based on early traumas in life. I'd love to know why he hated hats and why my current bird hates gallon jugs of water with the anger of a thousand suns compressed into a feathery missile of rage.
Birds in general don't like things on your face in my experience. It's either turbo Satan and must die or dirt and therefore must be groomed away
This reminds me of when I was in college and was undiagnosed Bipolar disorder, and my roommate was undiagnosed OCD. I was up and bopping at 3 am and decided to help my OCD roommate with the dishes since he was up and bopping but for very different reasons. I was drying a dish when our third, neurotypical, roommate came out to ask us to stop since we were being loud.
I looked at the dish I was washing and shushed it and told it to be nicer to my roommate.
IMO, this is one of the better arguments for parrots having some of the most human-like intelligence in the animal world outside of primates. Having had both toddlers and parrots, they do exhibit a lot of similarities in behavior patterns, and I could swear my kids have done exactly what this person describes their bird doing.
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I once told my daughter that a star that is only visible to grown ups appears on her forehead when she is lying. Soon she started to hide her forehead when lying 😂
Even today - although older - I ask her to show me her forehead and I can read her reaction like a book
Some of the people who study Dolphins think that they might actually have a language that can be learned.
It doesn't seem to be a "might" but a "probably definitely". Couldn't find the link right now but one of the few actually uses of AI that I've seen was to map out animal languages (specifically dolphins and other cetaceans) to develop a translator, Something something if you throw different (human) languages at a space and then dimension reduce it you get quite similar structures even though the languages are vastly different on the surface, and things like dolphins apparently aren't that far off and definitely not less complex.
Or, put differently: Yes, they're actually building a universal translator based on the assumption that because language-capable beings end up speaking roughly similar things you get structural overlaps if you have a sufficiently abstract representation of language (such as a neural net that learned to distinguish it from other stuff).
Aside from that it's been known for a longer time that dolphins are capable of relating complex information to another, e.g. you put one in one pool, the other in another, they can hear but not see another, and they can coordinate pressing buttons in one pool to get at fish in the other.
Also dolphins can recognise that a human gal is afraid of their teeth, disarm themselves with a tennis ball, and thus succeed in their task to get a handjob. That was part of Lilly's programme to teach dolphins English (they really struggle with consonants) which is a book honestly everyone should have read. Don't ask me which book in particular involves an injured dolphin co-habituating with the experimenter (aforementioned gal).
That's hella cool. I remember talk as far back as the 90s that dolphins might actually have a meaningful language, but I thought those hypotheses just ran into dead ends.
A lot of research like thay runs into dead ends. I think the issue is that their vocalisations are in such a broad range. But the study that I got the coles notes version indicated that dolphins may have named the researchers.
My mom had an African grey that would bark like the dog then yell at itself for barking.
It also liked to beep like the answering machine.
We have friends who had an African Grey, and that bird had an insane range of sounds and phrases, etc that she would mimic. Not just repeating words and phrases but impersonating the voice of whomever would say it to her. Like the AOL "You've got mail" voice when she'd hear the modem sounds. If we were smoking weed, the bird was having a coughing fit and dinging a pipe on an ashtray. If we were laughing and talking, the bird was over there laughing it's ass off too. From calling the dogs, to having one-sided phone conversations, to setting off a car alarm whenever anyone would leave, her repertoire was seemingly endless. And then there was the smoke alarm. She liked to pull that one out if she wanted attention, and it would split your eardrums...
its always funny to me that a perfect imitation of a sound, is often more eerie than someone simply repeating it.
To my understanding, birds don't understand english, they understand noises, and have the capability to replicate a lot of noises. So what happens is they often just replicate words and phrases, as if it was a noise. But due to human psychology, that shit weirds us out more than you would think it should.
If dogs could talk like a parrot, I'm sure they'd be saying it while doing something they know they'll be scolded for. They won't do shit while you're watching, and they totally know they did bad when you catch them; yet they still do it when you're not watching.
So true. I thought my dog was sick, because she was acting so weird. It turned out she ripped a couch cushion and was either feeling guilty or scared of our reaction. I don't buy that it was in reaction to how I was treating her because I definitely didn't know.
if i wasn't such a fucking isolated person by nature i would totally fuck with having birds as pets.
Goofy ass motherfuckers.
yes which is why i find it fucking hilarious. But also the reason i will never have a bird lmao.
My old roommate had a budgie called Bobby. We lived in a shitty flat near a junction that led out of town so a lot of police cars and ambulances went past. Bobby fairly quickly started imitating the siren sounds with his whistles.
Completely unrelated, my favorite moment in learning non-American English expressions was discovering that an international version of "banana hammock" is "budgie pocket"