PARROT SHOPPING PARROT FASHION
African greys put felons behind bars and go shopping with Amazon Alexa; plus the origins of the UK’s burgeoning parakeet population
Corienne Pretorius, 39, was baffled after a £10 order for gift boxes, which she hadn’t ordered, arrived at her house in Greenwich, southeast London. She eventually realised the culprit was Buddy – the family’s African Grey parrot. The bird mimics her voice, and had placed the order using Amazon’s Alexa voice-operated software.
“I couldn’t believe it when I realised that it was Buddy who had used Alexa to make an Amazon order,” she said. “None of us even knew how to use her for that. We’ve had the Echo for about four months and I use it to play music or make to-do lists but I’ve never ordered anything online. On Sunday [17 Sept 2017] we had popped out of the house for a couple of hours, but when I came home, I could hear Buddy talking but couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. Then I heard Alexa say ‘Sorry I didn’t quite get that’. Buddy then said ‘Alexa’ and some gibberish, and she replied ‘What is it you want to order?’ I didn’t hear what happened after that and didn’t think anything of it until I was working on my computer and got a notification that my Amazon order had been placed. I hadn’t ordered anything and couldn’t figure out what had been ordered. I asked my husband and my son who didn’t know what I was talking about so then I asked Alexa: ‘What was my last order?’ and she said it was these golden gift boxes. I laughed out loud because I knew then and there that it must have been Buddy.’
Ms Pretorius, who is originally from South Africa, bought the four-year-old bird on a whim in 2013, and says he has always mimicked her when she is out of the room. “Buddy talks a lot, but never when he can see me,” she said. “If I’m in the room, he won’t say anything because he’s listening and then when I leave he talks in my voice. He started making this bizarre squeaking noise, and it was only when I opened the fridge and it made the same noise that I realised that he was mimicking the door of the fridge opening. He is hilarious – we have a cat and he mimics the cat too, he’s such an attention seeker. He also swears in Afrikaans. When we go to bed he says ‘Goodnight’.” D.Mail, Sun, 20 Sept 2017.
“He swears in Afrikaans. When we go to bed he says‘Goodnight’”
PARROTS FOR THE PROSECUTION
A parrot brought a serial burglar to justice by biting the man’s hand, allowing his blood to be used as DNA evidence. Vitalij Kiseliov broke into the home of Peter and Trudy Rowing in Gillingham, Kent, during the night of 15 June 2017, stealing a laptop, a phone, two oxygen tanks and four cans of lager. He also tried to take Rocky, the African grey parrot, out of his cage – the birds can retail for £500. Rocky bit Kiseliov on the hand, and he left a trail of his blood around the house. Mr Rowing, 72, said he and his wife had had Rocky for more than 20 years, adding: “The police reckon Kiseliov threw Rocky out of the window because he bit him. They found blood by the door. They got him the next day because he was on their DNA database.”
Rocky was soon reunited with his owners after their granddaughter put out an appeal on Facebook. “Someone found Rocky and passed him to the RSPCA,” said Mr Rowing. “We were able to prove that he was our bird and he was reunited with us a few days later. He was very shaken for a good few days, but is back to normal now.” Kiseliov, 37, who admitted six burglaries in Gillingham, was jailed for four years and will then be deported back to Lithuania. D.Telegraph, D.Mail, Sun, 11 Aug 2017.
The defendant in a Michigan trial that featured the testimony of a parrot [ FT344:11] has been found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. Glenna Duram shot her husband, Martin, in front of the couple’s pet in 2015, before turning the gun on herself in a failed suicide attempt. The African grey named Bud had been repeating a conversation ending with the words “Don’t fucking shoot” in the victim’s voice. “That bird picks up everything and anything, and it’s got the filthiest mouth around,” said the victim’s mother, Lillian Duram. A prosecutor initially considered using Bud’s squawkings as evidence in the murder trial, but this was vetoed by the judge, who pointed out the bird couldn’t be cross-examined. There was a precedent, however: a cockatoo named Bozo was called to give evidence in a 1990 divorce case in Argentina [ FT59:9]. BBC News, 20 July; Sunday Sun, 8 Oct 2017.
For other recent parrot tales, see FT355:8-9.
UK PARAKEET ORIGINS
The contemporary legend that Britain’s parakeet population began with birds from the set of The African Queen might actually be true, according to Hana Ayoob, a curator speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June. She said that her great grandfather had lived near to Worton Hall Studios in Isleworth, west London, where many of the jungle scenes were recreated. He recalled that after filming finished in 1951, “little green parrots” began to arrive in local gardens.
“No one is 100 per cent sure where they came from,” said Ms Ayoob. “There is a story that at the end of filming of The African Queen they released all the parakeets that had been used on set. There is a lot of scepticism around this story, but my greatgrandparents were living near to the studio at that time and my great granddad remembers one day these little green parrots started to appear in his garden, and his neighbour’s gardens and started eating his apple trees. He started feeding them with nuts and dates and dried fruit, and so did loads of his neighbours, and then when winter arrived they started building them little wooden shelters in the back garden. This went on for quite a few years until the winter of 1962-63, which was quite a cold winter, and the birds disappeared. The theory is that then they moved into central London because it was much warmer, and they have thrived there.”
Escaped parakeets have been spotted in Britain since the 19th century, with the earliest recorded sightings in Norfolk in 1855, Dulwich in 1893 and Brixton in 1894. However, the populations began to increase rapidly after the Fifties, and by the Nineties they were frequently spotted in the capital. The bird is native to southern India, but there are now around 8,600 breeding pairs of ring-necked parakeets living throughout England, with the biggest population in west London. They have also been spotted on the borders of Wales and Scotland. The birds have a 35-year lifespan and few local predators, enabling them to breed freely.
Stories about their origins range from claims that Jimi Hendrix released a breeding pair in Carnaby Street in the Sixties, to suggestions they escaped from private collections during the Great Storm of October 1987. Other legends said they escaped from a pet shop in Sunbury on Thames in 1970, or from Sion Park in west London in the early 1970s when debris from a passing plane damaged the aviary. The link to The African Queen emerged when large flocks started appearing near Isleworth in the Nineties, but it was initially dismissed as fanciful, particularly as the film was often wrongly listed as being filmed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. Some film historians also insisted that parakeets were never used in the film. But Ms Ayood added: “The birds probably came from several locations.” Citymetric. com, 17 Nov 2017; D.Telegraph, 10 June 2018. See also Mythconceptions 125, ‘Parakeets of London’, FT258:23.