Communications via a salty vocabulary
Sometimes those of us in the newspaper business call them “brights,” those odd little features that poke through the daily miasma of news about politics, weather, and proclamations from our attorney general. Recently the shenanigans of a group of African grey parrots produced such a cheering bright.
The eight birds, residents of Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in Friskney, England, are famous for spouting curse words, with clear articulation and suitable volume, in the direction of visitors. Their language, according to NPR, mortified and amused those who work at the park, which is respectable and renowned for being family-friendly.
The language is suspected of being spread by Billy, Elsie, Eric, Jade and Tyson, parrots donated to the park early in the covid-19 pandemic; three other greys soon learned to emulate their new park mates.
“The parrot behind me was making quite obscene noises” during the filming of a recent TV segment, park CEO Steve Nichols said in a video update on Facebook. “I did apologize straightaway, saying it’s not my fault if they actually [say] a little bit of effing and jeffing.”
The origin of their speech, he says, is “certainly down to humans.” And what makes it memorable is that this particular species is capable of replicating human voices very accurately. Unlike, say, one of those text-reading robots, they get the inflections right—their cursing is spiced and heated properly.
Parrots learn through mimicry, so the park is integrating the profanity-possessed birds into a larger flock that hasn’t had the advantages of acquiring expletives, where they will “hopefully learn all the nicer sounds and words,” Nichols told NPR.
The more perverse among us are hoping that the larger flock, sensing a chance to cause trouble and gain notoriety, will gleefully learn how to curse from the newcomers, thus spreading foul-mouthed utterances far and wide.
This reminds me of my family’s parakeet Wilbur. He adored my mother, who spent some of her housewifery time trying to get the little blue bird to say “Pretty Boy.” He would chirp cheerfully at her, but never rewarded her efforts by saying the words she tried to teach him.
Then came an evening when some of my dad’s brothers, an alpha lot if there ever was one, came over with their wives for Manhattans and Croatian-style braggadocio. My dad was walking from the living room into the kitchen with Uncle Mike—the only brother with a college degree earned at Ohio State University, although he had nothing on the cocky arrogance of his siblings except for his insistence that he taught Vince Edwards, who played a doctor in the popular TV series “Ben Casey” that aired on ABC from 1961 to 1966, how to swim (I later learned that Edwards had a swimming scholarship to OSU and later went to Hawaii to train as an Olympic swimmer) who was relating an incident that required describing another man as a son of a b **** .
Even though Wilbur’s cage was covered (a practice meant to allow for a peaceful night’s sleep, with a bird’s head poked beneath shoulder feathers to keep warm), apparently he was alert enough to keep up with the conversation. Because the next morning, when his cage was uncovered, Wilbur skipped his usual whistle-based repertoire and clearly uttered “son of a b **** .” He continued to do so until his death about six years later.
Since parakeets and other talking birds have been known to swear in order to attract attention, animal behaviorists suggest that ignoring the behavior might discourage such bursts of vulgarity. My mother tried that; it didn’t work. So she went back to encouraging the bird to spout off milder remarks.
So, in recognition of his newly acquired ability to speak, Wilbur eventually mastered “Pretty boy.”
As for the potential for successful re-education of the British birds, the CEO of the wildlife park is more concerned with making sure they thrive than with the potential offending of visitors with tender ears.
“Parrots are flock creatures,” Nichols said. “They need to be with other parrots. The bigger the flock, the happier they are. Even though they swear, the welfare of the birds has to come first.”
Damn right. And the story made a helluva bright.