If somebody gifts you with any bird in cage what will you do and why?
Answers
When Louise Irving first met her husband Gordon, in South Africa in the mid-1970s, she came between him and an intense love affair that was passionate, fierce and all-consuming. The situation seemed hopeless. Any free love notion of an open relationship was intolerable. Her man was taken. ‘I knew Winston loved my husband so much,’ Louise recalled. ‘But he was very unhappy about me. Winston would mimic my voice when they were together in the bath. I had to watch myself. I couldn’t go near Gordon.’ Worse still, Winston was capable of violence, and it was quite likely, she realised, that he wanted her dead.
But Louise had no ordinary rival in love. Winston was an African Grey Parrot, and Gordon was his sole life partner. His attachment was hardly surprising. Parrots spend their lives nurturing a single, intensely monogamous relationship — and, if they are made to live without other parrots, they will forge that singular relationship with a person. Their natural average lifespan — 50 or 60, sometimes even 70 years — is spent obsessively demanding another parrot’s devoted attention, nuzzling and purring, but also screeching and scratching and biting each other. In the wild, they flock with others, but always fly wingtip-to-wingtip with their chosen mate.
Eventually, despite Winston’s protests, Louise and Gordon had sons. Luckily, Winston took to their boys. ‘He showed his love,’ remembered Louise. Indeed, Winston liked other people, too, not just Gordon. He enjoyed teasing guests they had round for dinner — he could even sense when a joke was being told and could mimic a human laugh just as someone said the punchline. At other times, the family had to wait to hear their telephone’s fifth ring before answering because Winston made a habit of tricking them by belting out four precisely imitated phone rings. Winston was beloved by everyone, including Louise, but Louise was someone Winston was never going to accept. ‘I knew my place,’ she said. ‘My husband regurgitated his food to feed him. He lived on my husband’s shoulder, went everywhere with him. I came into the bird’s life and he was very unhappy about it. Every time I walked by, he tried to bite me.’
A parrot’s imprinting with a human surrogate follows a predictable script: utter fidelity expressed through its natural mating behaviour. Unlike dogs, which parted from their grey wolf ancestors about 30,000 years ago, and house cats, whose domesticated origins are murkier and perhaps even more ancient, a pet parrot, no matter where it is born or how tenderly hand-raised, is a wild animal. A sustained historical encounter with people has profoundly shaped canine and feline behaviour and physique. But apart from introducing a few new colour schemes through mutation, human interaction with parrots hasn’t changed so much as a beak or a foraging technique. A human-weaned parrot — ‘psittaciformes’ is the parrot’s scientific nomenclature — is tame, but its behavioural repertoire is still wild, a true descendant of the dinosaurs. Thanks to our selective breeding, dogs and cats not only have infantilised behaviour but also neotenised faces — the big baby eyes and cute snub noses that stimulate our nurturing impulses and flood our brains with feel-good oxytocin hormones. Parrots have none of that.