Posted on 01/19/2004 2:55:23 PM PST by Kepitalizm
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Foul-mouth parrot mimics Churchill's wartime thoughts
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Mon Jan 19,10:23 AM ET
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LONDON (AFP) - The inner thoughts of Britain's wartime leader Winston Churchill live on, thanks to the foul mouth of his 104-year-old parrot who lives at a garden centre in southeast England.
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"F*** Hitler! F*** the Nazis!" says Charlie, a female blue and gold macaw which Churchill bought in 1937, two years before the outbreak of World War II in Europe.
"Parrots are remarkably adept at mimicking sounds and voices," says an article about Charlie in the February issue of Jack, a British men's magazine, which hits the newsstands on Thursday.
"So when Charlie gives her opinion of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, it is rendered with a Churchillian inflection," it said.
Following Churchill's death in 1965, Charlie was sold to pet shop owner Peter Oram, who keeps her at the garden centre in Reigate, Surrey, where she wanders around the grounds in summer but stays indoors in the winter.
"She is a very old parrot," Sylvia Martin, who works with Oram, told Jack. "She has become increasingly quarrelsome -- and, if the truth be told, is now looking a little scruffy."
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It took us a long time, but we *finally* learned to hear the difference between our phone ringing and our African Grey parrot doing a pitch-perfect rendition of it.
African Grey's are amazing -- while most large parrots can learn to speak and have surprisingly large vocabularies, most talk with that stereotypical "parrot" voice. But African Grey's are perfect mimics -- you'd swear they were feathered tape recorders. They can not only reproduce people's specific voices so well that they can fool the person's spouse, but they can do amazingly accurate renditions of almost any other sound as well, like dogs barking, cats meowing, door hinges sqeaking, phones ringing, videogame sounds, dog toy squeakers, power tools, knocking on doors (wood or metal), the distinctive sound of a squirt bottle... The list is endless.
Furthermore, as lab research subjects they have indicated clear ability to count, categorize by shape/color/material/arrangement, answer and ask specific questions, and so on: "THAT DAMN BIRD" A Talk with Dr. Irene Pepperberg.
LOL -- while looking up links for this post, I ran across a page with this anecdote about Alex, the original research subject:
A parrot after my own heart
Last Sunday, I spent a beautiful fall afternoon walking around Valley Forge National Historical Park with my seven-year-old son Mac and Dick Oehrle, whom I've known since we were undergraduates together.
Dick's daughter once worked as a research assistent for Irene Pepperberg at the University of Arizona. Dick relayed this story about the language skills of Alex the African Grey Parrot.
It seems that Cheerios cereal was a favorite treat among the parrots in the lab. At a certain point, someone went to a new local health food store, and brought back some healthy organic O-shaped whole-grain cereal. Alex tried a mouthful, spit it out, looked at the provider, and said, very distinctly:
"Wood."
Of course, what you're reading is my re-telling of Dick's re-telling of his daughter's story, which itself might have been second hand. But still.
Charlie
Besides, I thought Winnie was partial to pigs?
"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals"-Winston Churchill
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