From the Archives… April 2003…
My wife left the bird in his room, eating a walnut for three minutes. She went downstairs
to grab something, and came back up. In that time the bird took it upon himself to come down from his cage, leave his room, run down the hall to our bedroom, fly up onto the bed and pull out the keys from the keyboard.
The real irony is at the same moment I was giving a presentation at the Durham Avicultural Society in Ajax, ON and going on and on about how well behaved my bird was.
Isn’t this going to be fun to reassemble? Hopefully I won’t be replacing the keyboard It just goes to show that no matter how good a bird may be, they are all children in need of supervision.
Another reason why you should not get a parrot… it’s difficult to know where it came from.
Depending on where you live, it’s possible that the pet parrot you are looking to purchase may have come directly from the wild. In places like Australia you can see sulphur crested cockatoos for sale for next to nothing ($20).
In other places your bird may have had to endure a terrible journey of capture and transport from the wild. For every bird that survives the journey to the store, many more die along the way. Sometimes the capture and transport of these birds is legal, sometimes it is smuggling. Smuggling can involve birds being drugged and placed inside stockings so they don’t make any noise along the trip. Again, many die along the way.
On the other hand your parrot may have been born in your country. Unfortunately not too many standards of care exist or are necessarily enforced. The equivilent of ‘puppy mills’ exist in the bird world too. Filthy conditions, crowded cages, etc.
Of course, you may never see these horrible conditions. It’s possible that your local pet store merely buys the bird from these less than reputable breeders and puts it in their store.
What is the ‘breeding stock’ that makes up your parrot’s genetic background. Is the mother and father merely a discarded bird, one that has been given up because it is an aggressive bird, a feather plucker, or a screamer? Like the breeder James Murphy used to say “If you breed alligators with alligators you get alligators.” Are you ready to raise the next generation of problem parrot?
Having said all this, if you still are convinced that you absolutely have to one… before you buy one do your research. Find out where the bird came from. ‘The Pet Store’ or ‘The Breeder’ is not a good answer. There are plenty of decent breeders out there. Take the time to find one.
Know what the concept of geophagy is all about? It is the process of eating clay, likely to neutralize certain toxins. Here are some of the video clips from my sighting of them in Australia.
Focus, which took over Do It All, reached an out-of-court settlement with Glyn Atherton, of Chesterfield, Derbyshire, just before the case was due to be heard by the High Court in Sheffield.
Mr Atherton won a six year battle for compensation after he contracted a rare disease, psittacosis, from an African grey parrot.
Although Mr Atherton - an assistant manager at Focus Do It All, in Bulwell, Nottingham - did not work in the Pet World section of the store, he often walked through it and past the parrot during the day.
It just goes to show that no matter how good a bird may be, they are all children in need of supervision. 
