Living With An African Grey Parrot

 Since buying our African Grey in 1999, the years in between have been a mixture of astonishment, amusement and frustration with our sweet bird. Her vocabulary has grown tremendously and there's even well-timed crack-ups at our jokes. 

Knowing that any words used repeatedly will eventually be hurled back at us, we avoided "Will you shut the f@ck up?!" in favor of "What's your problem?!" Yet, even that boomerang packs a sting when your bird drops it on you when their yacking is getting on your nerves. 

 While the speaking is generally somewhat nasally random clips of words, there are times when you get a whole sentence like "What are you doing over there?" with all the nuance and clarity of your own voice! Just like a recording. That's pretty startling and wonderful, but rare. 

 Our bird was bred and hatched in the US and has never been sick or had any plucking habits. We trim her flight feathers ourselves, but it could cost over $100 if the Vet did this for us. Generally the beak and talons are sanded down a bit during this kind of visit as well. There were no additional vaccines. Boarding costs $20 per night. Expect to spend about $1,500 up front for everything you purchased, bird, brand new cages and perches. 

The Certificate of Hatch said it was a female capable of laying eggs, but after almost 2 decades we had accepted that perhaps it was her diet or maybe they made a mistake and it was a male. When compared to the year it took for her first words (which seemed like forever and made us feel like a complete fail), imagine discovering she laid FOUR EGGS IN ONE DAY this Summer after EIGHTEEN YEARS???  

 So here they are! It’s like a gardener who's done everything just right to get that rare orchid to flower! 

 We feel really lucky that we have a healthy, socialized bird and remind anyone planning to get this type of a bird to remember that it is 100% a bird and that moments of purposeful actions focused around you will be few, especially if you don't spend adequate time with it. They are capable of everything: days of silence, a vicious unprovoked bite, hours of pointless singing aka screeching, ravenous appetite, or a day of fasting. They love to gnaw, climb, bathe in their water dish, be rubbed, be misted, sling things, test their wings and be a part of the household action. This means more cleaning and more risk to items in their reach, such as your fingers, nose, wires and wood trim! But, it's nothing personal. It's a bird being a bird. 

 If you have a talker, getting actual words yelled at you takes the guess work out of what they want; when we get too distant she gets restless, tosses food and water and asks to be moved from one perch to another, or to her cage. There’s a thin line between Love and Hate. Over the years there have been battles that were sustained enough to make us believe her intent was to break us, but people who study them estimate their brain power to that of a 2 year old. Let that sink in. She'll never grow up and there’ll be no reasoning with a bird. If you don’t handle stress well, this isn’t the pet for you.   We’re going on twenty years with this beautiful bird. She’s a grown woman, a clown and a companion, easily the center of our lives.