47 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'.