97 Fun Facts About Parrot

Which animated film follows Blu, a Spix's macaw?

Rio made a star of the Spix's macaw, a blue Brazilian parrot that habitat loss and trapping pushed out of its homeland; it was declared extinct in the wild in 2019.

Along with parrots, which other bird group is considered the most intelligent?

Corvids such as crows and jays rival parrots on cognition tests, and both groups pack on average twice as many neurons into their brains as primates do in a brain of the same size.

About half of all parrots alive, some 50 million birds, live where?

In captivity: a 2021 estimate put the parrots in zoos, breeding centres and above all private homes at about 50 million, as many as remain wild, where the order is among the most threatened of all birds.

A climbing parrot pulls itself upward with its feet and which 'third limb'?

The beak, driven by the neck, works as a true third limb: a climbing lovebird's head pulls as hard as a primate's arm, beating a 'forbidden phenotype', since no vertebrate has an odd number of limbs.

Where is parrot diversity greatest today?

South America and Australasia hold the greatest variety of parrots, which fits an origin on the southern supercontinent Gondwana, yet the oldest sure parrot fossils come from Eocene Europe.

Genome studies show which group is the parrots' closest living relative?

The perching birds, or passerines, are the parrots' sister group, and the pair's next-nearest relatives are the falcons, which makes a falcon closer kin to a parrot than to a hawk.

What Middle English word for a parrot survives today as a put-down for a vain, talkative person?

Popinjay reached Middle English from Old French papegai in the 1300s, and once 'parrot' appeared in the 1520s the old word lived on as a label for a vain, talkative person.

Which parrots alone have a movable head crest?

Cockatoos form their own family, Cacatuidae, and their feathers lack the light-scattering Dyck texture, which is why none has the vivid plumage of a macaw or a lorikeet.

The 8 cm buff-faced pygmy parrot, the world's smallest, shares which large island with the birds-of-paradise?

New Guinea's lowland forests hold this thumb-sized bird, which hops along tree trunks scraping off the lichen and fungi that make up its diet.

Which is the longest parrot, at about a metre?

The hyacinth macaw measures about a metre from crown to tail tip, and the naturalist Henry Bates wrote that its beak crushes to a pulp palm nuts that are hard to break with a heavy hammer.

In Treasure Island, Long John Silver's parrot Captain Flint is forever squawking which phrase?

Pieces of eight was the endless cry of Captain Flint, a bird Silver named after his old pirate captain and claimed was maybe two hundred years old.

Touch receptors along the inner edges of a parrot's beak are known collectively as what?

The bill tip organ packs touch sensors into pits inside the beak's curved tip, letting a parrot rotate a seed and peel its husk by feel, much as kiwi and sandpipers use theirs to find buried prey.

Unlike humans, parrot vision is sensitive to what?

Ultraviolet light shows parrots what we miss: male and female blue-fronted amazons look identical to us but differ in the ultraviolet, and some parrots choose mates by plumage that glows under it.

Studies of parrots showed they exhibit what human-like trait when picking up food?

Handedness, or footedness, showed up in 16 species: almost every adult favours one foot, matched to the eye it inspects food with, though young birds try both feet before settling.

What is the predominant plumage colour among parrots?

Green is a trick of the light in parrots: they have no green pigment, so the colour comes from a yellow pigment laid over feather structure that scatters blue.

Male and female eclectus parrots look so different that naturalists long mistook them for what?

Two separate species is how early naturalists classed them, because the sexes differ so sharply: unusually for birds, the female is the gaudier one, in vivid red and blue.

The last Carolina parakeet died in 1918 at the same zoo as the last of which bird?

The passenger pigeon, once counted in the billions, ended with Martha at Cincinnati Zoo in 1914; Incas, the last Carolina parakeet, died there four years later.

Which is the only parrot that lives in an alpine climate?

The kea lives in New Zealand's Southern Alps and is a famous problem-solver: one bird, Bruce, lost his upper beak and taught himself to preen with pebbles held against his tongue.

Almost alone among parrots, the swift parrot and the orange-bellied parrot do what every year?

Migrate across the sea: both breed in Tasmania in summer and fly north over Bass Strait to winter on the mainland, a sea crossing almost no other parrot makes.

Why do many parrots in the Americas and Africa eat clay?

It releases minerals and absorbs toxins: many seeds are chemically defended, and the clay of Peru's riverbank licks is also rich in the sodium that a rainforest diet lacks.

The kea has been recorded, uncommonly, hunting which large animal?

Adult sheep are attacked at night by a few kea that land on their backs and dig for fat, a habit filmed in 1992 that had earlier brought a bounty under which some 150,000 kea were killed.

Monk parakeets, the feral parrots of cities from Brooklyn to Barcelona, are unusual among parrots for building what?

Communal stick nests, with a separate chamber for each pair, can grow to the size of a small car, and on utility poles they have caused costly power cuts.

Parrots have no vocal cords; they make sound with which organ?

The syrinx sits at the base of the windpipe, and parrots are one of only three bird groups, with songbirds and hummingbirds, known to learn their calls rather than inherit them.

Alex, the bird studied for 30 years by Irene Pepperberg, was which species?

A grey parrot bought from a pet shop in 1977, at about a year old, Alex learned to identify 50 objects and seven colours and to count quantities up to six.

In 2005 Pepperberg reported that Alex understood which mathematical concept?

Zero was never taught to Alex: he had learned to say 'none' when two objects showed no difference, then used it, unprompted, for a quantity that was not there.

Alex the parrot's last words began with which phrase?

'You be good' opened the farewell Alex gave every evening, along with 'I love you' and 'See you tomorrow'; he said it as usual one night in September 2007 and was found dead the next morning, aged 31.

Which visitor did the parrot N'kisi reportedly greet with 'Got a chimp'?

Jane Goodall tells the story herself: N'kisi had seen a photograph of her with chimpanzees before she visited, and by 2004 news reports credited him with about 950 words.

Puck, the bird with the largest recorded vocabulary at 1,728 words, was what kind of parrot?

A budgerigar, not one of the big parrots, holds the record: Guinness credited Puck, of Petaluma, California, with an estimated 1,728 words by his death in 1994, over ten times the vocabulary of Alex the grey parrot.

Wild budgerigars are naturally what colour?

Green and yellow is the only wild colouring; a blue budgie carries one mutated gene that stops it making yellow pigment, which leaves only the blue that its feather structure scatters.

Which group of parrots do keepers rate as the best talkers after one African species?

The Amazona parrots learn their calls in the wild too: yellow-naped amazons in Costa Rica use three regional dialects, each shared by many roosts, with boundaries that stayed fairly stable for more than 20 years.

A Surrey garden centre claimed in 2004 that Charlie, its macaw fond of anti-Nazi curses, had once belonged to whom?

Winston Churchill 'never owned a macaw or anything remotely resembling it', his daughter Lady Soames said; the story, like the bird's supposed age of 104, came from the garden centre's owner.

Cookie, the oldest parrot ever verified by Guinness, lived from 1934 until 2016 at Brookfield Zoo, outside which US city?

Chicago's Brookfield Zoo opened in 1934 with Cookie among its first animals; in 2009 keepers retired him to their office because he ate better and seemed more at ease away from the public.

Which country had banned the export of its native birds by 1960?

Australia has barred the export of its native birds since about 1960, and the EU made a wild-bird import ban of its own permanent in 2007, after a temporary one brought in over avian flu.

The kākāpō is the world's only what?

Flightless parrot, and the heaviest of all, with males reaching 4 kg; it is also the only parrot to breed at a lek, where males gather on hilltops and boom from bowls dug in the ground to draw in females.

Sirocco the kākāpō became a conservation 'spokes-bird' after being filmed doing what?

Trying to mate with a presenter's head, zoologist Mark Carwardine's, came naturally: hand-reared after an illness as a chick, Sirocco imprinted on humans and takes more interest in people than in other kākāpō.

Rangers saved the last kākāpō from cats by moving them where?

Offshore islands, Codfish Island/Whenua Hou among them, took every bird found; numbers still slid to about 50 by 1995 before intensive management and supplementary feeding turned them round.

A parrot appears on the flag of which Caribbean nation?

Dominica's flag carries the sisserou, a parrot found nowhere else, and the bird's plumage makes it one of the very few national flags with any purple in it.

In Hindu mythology the parrot is the mount of which god?

Kamadeva, god of love, rides a parrot and carries a bow of sugarcane strung with a row of bees, from which he shoots arrows tipped with flowers.

The Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch concerns a non-existent breed called what?

The Norwegian Blue is only 'pining for the fjords', insists Michael Palin's shopkeeper, though John Cleese's Mr Praline has found that the dead bird was nailed to its perch.

Who called the Liberal Democrats' bird logo 'an ex-parrot'?

Margaret Thatcher borrowed Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch at the 1990 Conservative conference; six days later the supposedly dead party took Eastbourne from the Tories in a by-election.

Nearly every parrot species is listed under which international treaty?

The CITES convention, which controls wildlife trade, lists almost every parrot, rare or not: only four species sit outside its appendices, the cockatiel and the rosy-faced lovebird among them, all of them common pets.

The extinct broad-billed parrot, drawn by Dutch sailors in 1601, shared its island with which lost bird?

The dodo shared Mauritius with the broad-billed parrot, which Dutch sailors called the 'Indian raven' and pictured in the same 1601 print as its famous neighbour.

Pliny the Elder's first-century account describes Europeans keeping which parrot?

The rose-ringed parakeet fits the bird Pliny describes, with a red ring at its neck; he says a parrot learning to talk must be beaten on the head with an iron rod, its skull being as hard as its beak.

The world's southernmost parrot lives in the beech forests of which cold region?

Tierra del Fuego is home to the austral parakeet, a bird of cold southern beech forest; a hummingbird breeds there too, both from families most people place in the tropics.

What colour are parrot eggs?

White, like the eggs of owls and most other hole-nesting birds: laid out of sight in a dark hollow, a parrot's eggs need no mottling or camouflage.

The largest known parrot colony, tens of thousands strong, belongs to which species?

Burrowing parrot pairs dig their own nest tunnels into the cliff at El Cóndor in Argentina, tens of thousands of them side by side, in the largest parrot colony known.

In British football slang, a manager who says he is 'sick as a parrot' after a match is feeling what?

Bitterly disappointed, not ill: from the 1970s the phrase was half of a pair of football-interview clichés, the losing manager's answer to the winner's 'over the moon'.

Snowball the parrot, the first non-human proven to keep a beat, went viral dancing to which band?

Backstreet Boys had him bobbing his head in time in a clip posted by the bird shelter that took him in. Scientists who saw it went on to show that he really does follow the beat.

Which US president's pet parrot is said to have been carried out of his funeral for swearing loudly?

Andrew Jackson's bird reportedly cursed so long and loud in 1845 that it had to be carried from the house. A minister who attended told the tale, which historians call unauthenticated.

In Disney's Aladdin, Jafar's parrot is named after the villain of which Shakespeare play?

Othello's scheming standard-bearer Iago lent his name to the bird, voiced by the comedian Gilbert Gottfried. Early story drafts had called the character Sinbad.

Devoted fans of which American singer are known as Parrotheads and turn up in parrot hats?

Jimmy Buffett remarked at a 1985 Ohio concert that his parrot-hatted crowd kept coming back like the Grateful Dead's Deadheads. Younger fans are known as parakeets.

Which fruit, whose leaves contain the toxin persin, should never be fed to a pet parrot?

Avocado can severely harm or even kill birds, so keepers treat every part of it as off limits. Chocolate, caffeine and alcohol are banned from a parrot's bowl too.

Which nonsense poet published a book of parrot paintings at 19 and has a rare macaw named after him?

Edward Lear was a bird artist long before The Owl and the Pussycat. One of his plates matched a then-unnamed species, which a nephew of Napoleon later named Lear's macaw.

Lovebirds, the small parrots named for their devoted pair bonds, are native to which continent?

Africa is home to all nine species, one of them confined to the island of Madagascar. Their genus name, Agapornis, joins the Greek words for love and bird.

Clever wild cockatoos living in Sydney have learned to open what in search of food?

Garbage bins are the prize for these city birds, which have adapted well to urban life. The same species can live for upwards of 70 years in human care.

Which big-billed birds of the American tropics are relatives of woodpeckers rather than parrots?

Toucans sit with barbets and woodpeckers in the order Piciformes, for all their parrot-bright colours. They even nest in holes that woodpeckers have dug.

Polly, the stock name for a pet parrot, began as a rhyming pet form of which woman's name?

Mary gave the pet form Molly, which was then rhymed into Polly. The name was already being given to parrots by the 1610s.

Which hero of a classic novel adopts a parrot for company during his years alone on an island?

Robinson Crusoe adopts the bird as he builds a solitary life on the island, well before Friday appears. Daniel Defoe published the novel in 1719.

In Hugh Lofting's stories, the parrot Polynesia teaches animal languages to which title character?

Doctor Dolittle was an ordinary English physician until Polynesia, his first animal friend, showed him how other creatures speak. He then gave up human patients to treat animals.

A costumed parrot has been the mascot of which Major League Baseball team since hatching in 1979?

Pittsburgh Pirates bosses brought in the bird to lift sagging attendance, inspired by the rival Phillie Phanatic. He made his debut at Three Rivers Stadium on April Fools' Day.

Which painter posed with pet birds for the 1941 self-portrait titled Me and My Parrots?

Frida Kahlo painted many self-portraits with her animals, a household that also included spider monkeys and hairless Xolo dogs. They kept her company in her house and garden.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a documentary about a feral flock, is set in which US city?

San Francisco's hilltop flock was fed and looked after by Mark Bittner, an unemployed musician living rent-free in a nearby cabin. He also wrote a memoir about the birds.

An urban myth traces London's wild parakeets to a pair freed on Carnaby Street by which rock star?

Jimi Hendrix is the star of the tale, which is set in the 1960s. A rival story blames birds that escaped from a film studio in 1951, and both are filed as urban myths.

About one in ten pet parrots develops which self-harming habit, often blamed on boredom?

Feather plucking can leave a bird with ruined plumage and sometimes damaged skin. Wild parrots live in stable flocks, while pets are often kept alone, which is thought to feed the disorder.

How are the four toes arranged on a parrot's foot, a layout suited to climbing and swinging?

Two forward, two back is the pattern, which scientists call zygodactyl. Each toe ends in a sharp, elongated claw.

The male palm cockatoo snaps a thick stick off a live tree to use for which unusual skill?

Drumming on a dead bough or tree, he makes a beat that carries about 100 metres. Afterwards he may shred the stick to line the nest.

Fossils of Squawkzilla, an extinct parrot almost a metre tall, were dug up in which country?

New Zealand's Otago region yielded the leg bones in 2008, and they were first taken for an eagle's. The giant lived some 16 to 19 million years ago.

Fumes from an overheated pan lined with which coating can be fatal to pet parrots?

Teflon gives off fumes at very high heat, and a bird's rapid breathing lets in toxins that human lungs keep out. In people the fumes cause a flu-like illness nicknamed Teflon flu.

Which long-tailed pet parrot, native to scrub and bushland, has a round orange patch on each cheek?

Cockatiel keepers call the markings cheddar cheeks, and a male's grow brighter as he matures. The species ranks among the five most popular pet birds.

Lories and lorikeets have brush-tipped tongues, an adaptation for feeding mainly on what?

Nectar and pollen cling to the tufts of extremely fine hairs at the tip of the tongue. The birds can feed from the flowers of about 5,000 species of plants.

The hanging parrots of southern Asia are named for doing what upside down, uniquely among birds?

Sleeping upside down is something no other bird is known to do. The fifteen species are short-tailed parrots of the tropics, often told apart by the colours on their heads.

Which Disneyland show hosted by four talking parrots was the first to use Audio-Animatronics?

Enchanted Tiki Room opened in 1963 as a musical show performed by mechanical birds. Walt Disney's team had first planned it as a restaurant where the birds would serenade diners.

Which pink-and-grey parrot's name doubles as slang Down Under for a fool or a clown?

Galah comes from gilaa, a word in Yuwaalaraay and neighbouring Aboriginal languages. A touring national football side even took the Galahs as its nickname in the late 1960s.

Maps of the early 1500s labelled which newly reached country the Land of Parrots?

Brazil was Terra dos Papagaios to the Italian merchants who questioned returning crews in Lisbon in 1501. A map of 1516 still paired that label with the name Brasilia.

The scarlet macaw, a red, yellow and blue rainforest parrot, is the national bird of which country?

Honduras claims the bird as its national symbol, though scarlet macaws range from south-eastern Mexico as far as Peru and Bolivia.

Parrot fever, which people can catch from infected pet birds, is caused by what kind of microbe?

A bacterium of the chlamydia family is to blame, shed in the droppings and nasal discharge of infected birds. A pandemic of the disease swept the world in 1929 and 1930.

In the cartoon Peppa Pig, Polly Parrot is the pet of which members of Peppa's family?

Her grandparents, Granny and Grandpa Pig, are Polly's owners. Like most parrots, she copies whatever others say.

To attract mates, the male kākāpō inflates a chest sac in a dug-out bowl and makes which sound?

A deep boom, pitched below 100 hertz, rolls out of bowls that the male digs beside rocks or trunks to reflect the sound. He may keep it up for six to eight hours at a stretch.

The Māori name kākāpō, combining the words kākā and pō, translates into English as what?

Night parrot suits a bird that roosts under cover by day and roams its territory after dark. It also sniffs out its food, a skill reported in only one other parrot species.

A parrot's nostrils open in which waxy patch above the bill, whose colour can reveal the bird's sex?

The cere takes its name from cera, the Latin word for wax. Raptors and owls have one too, and in some birds of prey its colour signals how healthy the owner is.

The blue of a blue-and-yellow macaw comes not from pigment but from spongy keratin doing what?

Scattering light off randomly oriented nanochannels in the keratin gives a blue that looks the same from every angle, unlike the shifting shimmer of a peacock's tail.

Audubon noted that which animals apparently died after eating the cocklebur-fed Carolina parakeet?

Cats were the victims, which suggests the birds were poisonous themselves. They loved cocklebur seeds, which contain a toxic glucoside, and were valued for keeping the weed down.

In the parrot astrology of Tamil Nadu, a trained parakeet tells a customer's fortune by doing what?

Picking a card from a deck of just 27 is the bird's whole job, and each card bears the image of a religious figure. The fortune tellers work under trees or by the roadside.

The iguaca, a parrot whose wild population once fell to just 13 birds, is native to which island?

Puerto Rico's only surviving native parrot got its Taíno name from the sound of its flight call. Its numbers had already dropped to about 200 by the 1950s.

Kiki the parrot helps four children solve mysteries in the Adventure series by which British author?

Enid Blyton made Kiki the pet of Jack, one of the four. Her voice is sometimes mistaken for a real person's, which gets the children out of tight spots.

A Julian Barnes novel tracks down a stuffed parrot once kept on which French writer's desk?

Gustave Flaubert kept the bird on his desk for a brief period while writing the story A Simple Heart. The novel's narrator finds two museums that each claim to display it.

Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds are the only three bird groups shown to have which rare ability?

Vocal learning, the ability behind spoken language, has been detected in only eight animal groups. The others are humans, bats, whales and dolphins, seals and elephants.

The blue-and-yellow macaw shows which human-like reaction on its bare facial skin around people?

Blushing comes with fluffed-up feathers on the cheeks, head and nape. The species bonds closely with humans, one reason it is so popular with bird keepers.

At the end of each dry season in Darwin, many red-collared lorikeets show symptoms resembling what?

Drunkenness is only how it looks: real intoxication has been ruled out. The cause is unclear, but a seasonal virus is the leading suspect.

Monk parakeets, feral in many cities, also go by which other religious-sounding common name?

Quaker parrot is the bird's other everyday name. Its scientific genus name means mouse parrot, a nod to the mouse-grey face and underparts.

The word parrot may come from Perrot, a French dialect pet form of which man's name?

Pierre, the French Peter, is one leading guess, though dictionaries call the word's origin uncertain. Spanish may have built its own name for the bird on Perico, a pet form of Pedro.

Loro Parque, a zoo founded in 1972 with just 150 parrots, stands on which Spanish island?

Tenerife's park grew to hold some 4,000 parrots of about 350 species and subspecies, a collection described as the largest in the world. Its name is Spanish for parrot park.

The echo parakeet, down to about a dozen birds in the 1980s, survives on which Indian Ocean island?

Mauritius nearly lost what was then called the world's rarest parrot, but an intensive breeding effort lifted its numbers to about 750 by 2019.

In the Pirates of the Caribbean films, a parrot does the talking for which tongueless crewman?

Cotton lost his tongue before the story begins, so he trained the bird to answer for him with a large stock of phrases. The pair are hired in the first film to help win back the Black Pearl.

Wing clipping, done to keep a pet parrot from flying away, means trimming which part of its plumage?

Primary feathers on the wing are cut short so that the bird is not fully flight-capable. The effect lasts only until the next moult, when new ones grow in.

Mani, a parakeet in Singapore's Little India, won fame by forecasting results at which 2010 event?

FIFA World Cup quarter-finals all went the way he called them, as did Spain's semi-final. He then tipped the Netherlands for the final and lost, but trade at his owner's shop still soared.

A macaw's pattern of facial feathers is said to be as unique as which human identifier?

A fingerprint is the usual comparison. The bare, pale facial patch that carries the feather lines is itself one of the features that set macaws apart from other parrots.