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

Humans provide me with an endless source of entertainment. In fact, I find them rather comical because they like to believe that they are bright and intelligent and in control of everything, when in fact, the opposite is so often true. And their flaws and failings mean that they are certainly not the happiest of God’s creatures here on Earth. And I guess that we parrots simply have to put up with them and try to do our best to humour them. Parrots, on the other hand, are usua

Humans like to build their own flying machines because God never gave them their own set of wings. And not content with their metal ‘aeroplanes,’ they’ve even gone so far as build their own rockets and to launch them into space. In fact, right now, -even as I tap away on the keyboard with my beak, -there’s a bunch of humans up there on a mission to the moon. Well, I say each to their own. Personally, I wouldn’t be that bothered about making a half million-mile return trip to

Being the refined, cultured bird that I am, I’ve learnt to appreciate the finer things in life including bone china. And if I find a piece of bone china lying around in the kitchen, I usually give it a tap with my beak to see if it gives off a good ring. And I’ve come to learn that if I don’t get the ringing sound, it usually means that it has a chip or a crack somewhere. And here in the West, humans get quite upset if their china becomes imperfect or damaged. It’s a differen

My owner was recently walking alongside a large stone wall. ‘Nothing very interesting in that,’ you may think. The wall had probably stood there for countless decades and born witness to a great many storms and gales. But it wasn’t only the wall that represented a symbol of defiance. Barely noticeable was a tiny fern which had somehow managed to grow out from between a couple of the granite blocks. There it was, defying all the odds, and bringing to its barren world a small,

Up until last week, something very important had been missing from my life. Yes, -it had been missing for a very long time. And I don’t mean chillies or nuts, or my special ‘parrot treats.’ No, I’m referring to the sun. Parrots like me are extroverts; we need sunny days to feel at our best. But here in North Devon, the sun had all but disappeared. Instead, we had rain, day after day after day. In fact, some parts of Southwest England it rained for more than 50 consecutive d

It’s always very important for parrots to keep up their appearance. So, we spend a great deal of time rearranging our feathers in order to look our best. And of course, we have a few places that we can’t quite get to, so that’s when we help each other out with a spot of mutual preening. And I always like my human owner to look at his best, so if I spot some sort of blemish on him, I always try to rectify it. So, for example, if he has a plaster on his finger, or maybe a prot

Humans like to have their science and technology; in fact, they all too often believe that if they haven’t invented something, then it can’t possibly exist. So that they like to focus on their machines, their robots, their internet, their AI, their theories and their formulas. Meaning that a great many of them close their eyes to the possibility of miracles ever taking place. Instead, they like to have a logical explanation for everything around them, meaning that the whole p