People who don’t live with parrots always ask the same question of those who do: can your parrot talk? That’s because humans love talking. From the cradle to the grave our lives are measured, trimmed, emboldened by words, and to hear another animal speak them back to us is nothing short of pure delight. Can we call it language? Or just some parlour-trick illusion? Maybe it doesn’t matter one way or another. Maybe it’s enough to feel we are not entirely alone in our funny little world of words, spinning through the big dark universe as we are. and that’s why people — people who don’t live with parrots — always want to know if a parrot can talk.
People who don’t live with parrots always ask if a parrot can do tricks. That’s because humans love tricks. So, as it happens, do parrots. They can do almost anything with their feet that a human can, boasting twice the number of opposable thumbs. and while our own feeble mouths can barely crack a nut, a parrot’s beak is a miracle of engineering: an ingenious hook-and-chisel vice forged in an age of thundering reptiles, with all the sensitivity and grace missing from a handyman’s toolbox. In some other universe of geological twists, it may well have been parrots building great technological empires and taking primates as pets, training them to speak parrot, do parrot tricks… should they have evolved such wayward and unnecessary interests.
People who don’t live with parrots will always marvel at the familiarity of their intelligence, their playful curiosity, their friendly faces bright with intention and knowing smiles, their anthropomorphic little souls. Look at how they move their feet in time to music! The way they cock their head to one side! They are just like you and me!
So say the people who don’t live with parrots.
As for us, the people who do live with parrots, we see no such reflection in nature’s mirror. Behind those small, mercurial eyes that stare so fiercely into the noonday sun without flinching, there clicks a primeval arithmetic that grants no access. When happy a parrot will grind its beak angrily. When angry it will dance happily. It bites us with enough affection to draw blood, and the most sacred gifts of devotion are delivered as vomit. and even for such inverted expression all these chauvinistically human words — «happiness», «anger», «devotion» — are just meaningless chaff in the breeze. They are nothing compared to the squawk of a parrot, blanching our eardrums like a morning prayer straight out of the Jurassic, allowing no room for translation or reply. A parrot asks for neither. A parrot has already stolen our food, defecated on our shoulder and flown off to find something more interesting.
But when that same parrot returns, leans in against our face to preen hair and eyebrows — our sorry excuse for feathers — it does so with such surprising tenderness. Can we call it love? Yes, let’s call it love. The parrot will not mind, it will let us think whatever we want. Its heart trembles against our cheek like tiny jungle drums, the earth turns once again on its billion-year axis, and we think quietly to ourselves: what a strange privilege it is to be here, now, and living with a parrot.