Parrot Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
97 free Parrot trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Parrots are the smartest, longest-lived and most exploited birds on the planet, and this quiz covers all three. It starts with the order: roughly 410 species in four families, from a pygmy parrot lighter than a coin to the metre-long hyacinth macaw and the 4-kg kākāpō; where they live, why a third are threatened, and how they crack seeds, climb with their beaks as a third limb, and see in ultraviolet. Then the famous individuals and the culture around them: Alex, the grey parrot who grasped the idea of zero and whose last words were 'You be good'; Puck, the budgie with a 1,728-word vocabulary; Cookie, the cockatoo who outlived every animal in his zoo; N'kisi and his thousand words; Sirocco the kākāpō who became a Slack emoji; the kea that hunts sheep; the pirate's shoulder-parrot; the Dead Parrot sketch; and the sisserou on Dominica's flag. Easy questions ask what parrots eat and which pet parrot is the most popular; hard ones want syrinx anatomy, fossil dates and CITES exemptions. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on parrots and the individual birds involved, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Our Birds and Toucan quizzes go wider.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animated film follows Blu, a Spix's macaw?
Rio
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.
Q 02Along with parrots, which other bird group is considered the most intelligent?
Corvids such as crows and jays
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.
Q 03About half of all parrots alive, some 50 million birds, live where?
In captivity
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.
Q 04A climbing parrot pulls itself upward with its feet and which 'third limb'?
The beak
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.
Q 05Where is parrot diversity greatest today?
South America and Australasia
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.
Q 06Genome studies show which group is the parrots' closest living relative?
The perching birds
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.
Q 07What Middle English word for a parrot survives today as a put-down for a vain, talkative person?
Popinjay
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.
Q 08Which parrots alone have a movable head crest?
Cockatoos
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.
Q 09The 8 cm buff-faced pygmy parrot, the world's smallest, shares which large island with the birds-of-paradise?
New Guinea
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.
Q 10Which is the longest parrot, at about a metre?
Hyacinth macaw
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.
Q 11In Treasure Island, Long John Silver's parrot Captain Flint is forever squawking which phrase?
Pieces of eight
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.
Q 12Touch receptors along the inner edges of a parrot's beak are known collectively as what?
The bill tip organ
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.
Q 13Unlike humans, parrot vision is sensitive to what?
Ultraviolet light
Q 21The kea has been recorded, uncommonly, hunting which large animal?
Adult sheep
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.
Q 22Monk parakeets, the feral parrots of cities from Brooklyn to Barcelona, are unusual among parrots for building what?
Communal stick nests
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.
Q 23Parrots have no vocal cords; they make sound with which organ?
The syrinx
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.
Q 14Studies of parrots showed they exhibit what human-like trait when picking up food?
Handedness, or footedness
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.
Q 15What is the predominant plumage colour among parrots?
Green
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.
Q 16Male and female eclectus parrots look so different that naturalists long mistook them for what?
Two separate species
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.
Q 17The last Carolina parakeet died in 1918 at the same zoo as the last of which bird?
Passenger pigeon
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.
Q 18Which is the only parrot that lives in an alpine climate?
The kea
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.
Q 19Almost alone among parrots, the swift parrot and the orange-bellied parrot do what every year?
Migrate across the sea
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.
Q 20Why do many parrots in the Americas and Africa eat clay?
It releases minerals and absorbs toxins
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 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.
Q 24Alex, the bird studied for 30 years by Irene Pepperberg, was which species?
A grey parrot
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.
Q 25In 2005 Pepperberg reported that Alex understood which mathematical concept?
Zero
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.
Q 26Alex the parrot's last words began with which phrase?
'You be good'
'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.
Q 27Which visitor did the parrot N'kisi reportedly greet with 'Got a chimp'?
Jane Goodall
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.
Q 28Puck, the bird with the largest recorded vocabulary at 1,728 words, was what kind of parrot?
A budgerigar
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.
Q 29Wild budgerigars are naturally what colour?
Green and yellow
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.
Q 30Which group of parrots do keepers rate as the best talkers after one African species?
The Amazona parrots
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.