My owner’s had a very curious three months. Back in July, he stepped onto the edge of a friend’s overhanging patio. It suddenly collapsed, and he fell bottom-first onto a concrete path below. Mercifully no bones were broken, but it left him on crutches for a couple of weeks afterwards. And then, last Sunday, he went with his wife to a lovely place called ‘Waters Meet’ near Lynton, to have a training walk in readiness for climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. The path was described as

Here in the UK, humans have been getting very excited because it’s political party conference season. And that’s when loads of them flock together and make lots of noise about flawed ideas and even-more-flawed political leaders. I’ll never understand why, but they choose to sit in stuffy arenas for hours on end, listening to boring speeches in which a bunch of bullish humans attempt to impose their own personal agendas over the wider population. Hmm. Fortunately, we parrots d

Just when I thought I’d got my owner perfectly trained, he went off again, -and not just anywhere, but to visit some other parrots! He went to Paradise Park in Hayle, Cornwall, which is home of the World Parrot Trust. And I have photographic evidence to show that he was ‘two-timing!’ It’s all very strange, but parrots that have never met my owner before are instantly drawn to him. (Or is it that they’re really taking pity on him because of how he is?) Whatever, he clearly had

I’m now 26 years old. It’s taken me a long time, but I can look back on my life and feel proud of the way I’ve trained my human owner to take care of me. In fact, you could say that he’s now my ‘human domestic.’ And here’s why… My first ‘doings’ of the day is always enormous, so I never want to do it in my cage. I’ve therefore trained my owner to place me on the tap over the sink, and I can go there. Yes, that’s become our routine first thing every morning. And then we have t

I went to church last Sunday with my owner; he was taking the service, and the congregation were kind enough to invite me along as well. And on the whole, I was very well behaved. I sat on the back of a pew and listened quietly to the whole sermon. I joined in the hymns with some whistles and squawks. And I didn’t surprise anybody by suddenly landing on their head. Of course, I can’t go anywhere without making a bit of a mess. By the end of the service, there was a small moun

A couple of weeks ago, the doorbell rang. And that’s always an exciting happening because the bell plays a tune in the kitchen where I’m based and I always do my best to join in with it! Anyway, my owner went to the door, and there before him was a man with a large bag of things that he was selling. The man thrust a license into my owner’s hands and announced that he was an ex-prisoner trying to go straight. He was selling items to raise funds so that he could do a course in

We parrots are a sociable bunch. Most of us aspire to that old adage that “birds of a feather flock together.” And it works well for us; we’re not meant to be solitary or alone, and that’s why I’ve developed such a strong bond with my owner and his family. We’re there for one another during both good times and bad. And I have to admit that along with Lucy, -the ancient Labrador, -and the two chickens outside, we form something of a special community here. And it’s when we bec

My human family still hasn’t stopped talking about Greenland since returning home from their long migration there. And they keep on about the icebergs. Now, parrots and blocks of ice don’t usually go together; the mere thought of ice is enough to send a chill up my quills(!) But they were totally wowed by the icebergs that they saw. Perhaps that’s because every single iceberg, -just like humans themselves, -is totally unique. Some look like great aircraft carriers; others com

Hello again everyone! Last week, I was telling you how my owner and his wife recently travelled to Greenland and had an amazing experience. (Well, -amazing if you don’t mind the Arctic chill blowing up your feathers!) And one thing that they had to contend with was 24 hours of continuous daylight. This meant that they had to be very strict about when they went to bed because the lack of darkness can easily confuse the body’s biorhythm. So, to keep some semblance of day and ni

My owner and his wife have recently returned from a great migration. (And the very fact that you have continued to receive blogs while they’ve been away proves that I really am a parrot genius who writes his own material!) Being the strange humans that they are, they decided to swop the high temperatures of our hottest Summer on record for the freezing cold climes of the high Arctic. Yes, they went to Greenland for two weeks and visited some of the tiny communities that live

My owner spends a great many hours tending to his plants and growing lots of new crops every year. The most labour intensive are always the peas. He has to sow them indoors, or else the garden mice will eat up all the seed before it germinates. And so, he painstakingly sows 500 pea seeds into individual cells and grows them on until they are ready to be planted out. As this variety grows to more than 6’, he has to erect big frames with jute netting to keep the crop happy. The

Soon after moving into our current home, my owner put up ten sparrow terrace nest boxes on the side of our house. It was all because he’d seen a few sparrows in the neighbourhood and thought that they could do with a little bit of help. And within a couple of weeks, the sparrows had moved in. First, it was a couple of pairs, and before he knew it, there were a dozen pairs all making use of his upmarket accommodation. There was one drawback though. My owner hates climbing up l

There’s an old human saying that ‘opposites attract,’ and I’ve seen it for myself when humans with very different personality traits pair up together on the same perch. And I suppose this also applies to humans and parrots, because we’re not exactly of the same ilk. I therefore treat my human family as ‘honorary parrots,’ and in return, they have to adjust their existence to all of the things that make me, -well, -me! So where do I begin with all of this? Well, how about the

We parrots occasionally have our squabbles. The occasional nip has been known to occur, or in particularly bad cases, even the extraction of a prized feather(!) But that’s usually as far as it goes. On the whole, we’re quite a sociable bunch. In the human world, squabbles and disagreements tend to be a lot worse. And that’s because humans have invented things such as guns and bombs and missiles and huge walls, meaning that any disagreement can get totally out of hand. Jesus n

Hello again everybody! I’m a bit bleary-eyed today as it’s been a little while since I had a good night’s sleep. ‘And why is that’ I hear you ask? Well, I’m afraid that it’s Lucy, the elderly labrador, who shares this kitchen with me. Because in recent weeks, Lucy has started to wake up in the middle of the night. And because she’s old, and quite needy, she starts to bark until one of the humans in the house gets out of bed to attend to her. It’s not that she needs to go out,

A couple of weeks ago, I confessed to having once stormed the dog bowl and to having eaten up all of the dogfood while our very elderly labrador passively looked on. And I know it was a rather shameful thing to have done, especially as Lucy’s now 99 in human years. But I have to tell you that I am definitely not the main culprit in the matter. Certainly not, because we still have a serial offender! You see, we have two free-range chickens wandering around the garden. And one

A lot of parrots like me think that humans look pretty much the same, -well, at least the majority of them. And they probably all think the same about Senegal Parrots. We wear feathers and they wear clothes. But every so often, I come across a human being that is totally different; maybe different in the way that they look, or different in the way they see the world. Or, as in Nick Vujicic’s case, different in both of these ways. Nick Vujicic was born in 1982, to Serbian immi

On the whole, I’m a very brave, bold bird. Very little phases me in life, and I’m afraid that I’ve even been known to chase a hungry Labrador away from its bowl so I could eat all of its food up myself. But before you all shout ‘shame!’ at me, I’d like to confess that there are a couple of things which will always press my ‘panic button.’ I have an inbuilt fear of birds of prey, and I get the ultimate heebie-jeebies if I catch sight of a snake! So, I wasn’t too happy when my

In my book which came out a few years ago, I wrote a piece about feathers. And that’s not very surprising given that I’m a very beautiful parrot! It was entitled: ‘Is a feather simply a feather, or is it really a work of art?’ And that’s because feathers really are quite amazing things. In fact, birds like me have seven different types, each of which serves a different purpose. For example, my durable, shaped wing feathers have an interlocking microstructure which allows me t

Credit: Wallpaper.com Things are beginning to happen out there in the natural world. Things that make me feel even more happy than usual! Because the trees are covered in blossom. Our local woodpigeon is busy building her nest in a thicket of buddleia. And best of all, the swallows have returned and are energetically darting backwards and forwards across our garden. Now, of course, I’m a domesticated bird so I don’t go through all of the bother of migrating. But I really take