Week 11, Day 6 (If you're happy and you know it, be a pest)

Mothers tell me the 'terrible twos' are a bit of a shock to the system. I'm not worried - I'm an old hand at this behaviour.

Some wit once said a parrot is like having a five year old child who is permanently stuck in the terrible twos. That is too true (although most of the time, Joey acts like a smart-mouthed teenager stuck in the TT's).

Several words could describe Joey; irrepressible would be high on the list. In fact you're lucky I can make a coherent sentence at all today, such is her input. She's been cackling, giggling, hooting, and generally mouthing off since 6am this morning. (Oh how cute.. she's just sung to me "I love you, woooo" but then she ruined it with the tag "Joey, grapes!!" to display it was just cupboard-love all along.)

Joey's about seven and a half years old, from memory, and we've had her since she was five months. She's a Congo African Grey, the most vociferous parrot species on the planet, and has a vocab of more than 500 words and phrases. Actually, it probably surpasses that in spades - we stopped counting years ago and she's never stopped absorbing input in the interim.

To think - she didn't say a word for the first three months we had her and we started to wonder if she'd talk at all. Then she decided to speak, and we learned what the books meant when they said "Don't worry that your African Grey won't speak.. worry that it won't stop once it starts!"

We taught her our telephone number in case she ever (Goddess forbids!) gets loose, and discovered that parrots can fixate on the number 4. As there are four '4's in our telephone number, this was just asking for a stuck record of the Joey variety! After a while though, we got her to repeat the proper number without the extra digits - the trick was to offer her grapes (her favourite food second only to cheese). This is why Joey reminds us every so often "Joey, grapes?" as an incentive to pay the parrot tax.

Parrots don't have a voice box - according to the experts, they manufacture the sounds from their chests. I have another theory... and this is based on observing my parrot as she waffles and chortles her way through each day. With each word, Joey's distinctive red bum feathers part, flex and gesture, much like an Italian's gesticulation. This, coupled with her ability to never seemingly pause for breath, leads me to wonder if she is in fact somehow talking 'via her ass'! (Just kidding, but if you could see her, you'd know why we do wonder sometimes).

Joey loves to boss everyone around, including the furrier members of the household. For a long time she used to play dreadful tricks on The Wobble (aka Danny, Golden Retriever). He's banished outside on summer days, and knows it. Joey would call out in a perfect imitation of my voice "Waaaahble, Wobble.. Waaaaaaaaable, come on boy."

Being a dog, he would instantly obey.

The moment he set foot inside she would switch to "Bossy Mum" imitation and roar "WHAT ARE YOU DOING INSIDE? GET OUT SIDE NOW, OUT OUT OUT OUT!!!"

The dog would hustle outside so fast his feet seemed on fire. .... whereupon she would set about calling him again. One day when he flashed me a particularly hurt look upon exit, I told him "You idiot - you're taking orders from a parrot. Don't glare at me because you're a twit." He eventually learned to tell the difference and now accepts no imitations.

She also tries it on with the cats but being what they are, the cats don't answer to anyone but themselves. When the cats fail to obey, she soundly abuses them and calls them dirty birds, bad bad bad, go to bed ... then ruins the impact by laughing furiously.

Watching the news with Joey in fine form can be a matter of endurance. Chatter sets her off, and she often startles us with her accidental but still uncanny perception. Something funny will happen on TV and before the canned laughter kicks in, Joey will crack up laughing. It could well be that she watches us so closely as to know when we're likely to laugh, so gets in first, but it's still a weird thing to have a bird that seems to follow a television programme.

I think Joey watches too much television. She once told a guest, "Freeze scumbag! Stop or I'll shit". (Don't remember watching a "Dirty Harry with diarrhea" movie, but there you have it.) She's very inclined to gabble something incredibly rude about a guest, knowing that as they haven't got their ear tuned in to Joey-speak, that the awful insults will pass right over their heads. It does not, however, miss the ears of her pet humans, who go crimson in embarrassment and have to simultaneously swallow the laughter and make up vague lies when the guest realises they've missed something and ask "What did she say?" If the visitor talks a bit loud, Joey mumbles "hit the mute button, will ya?", and if they go on a bit, she's inclined to interject with "and SHE said.." in a very sarcastic tone, then burst into snide laughter. The times she's got me into trouble with clients over the phone when she starts laughing, and they mistake her for me.
"No truly, I don't find your business practices laughable! It's the parrot! Yes, it IS the parrot!" They don't usually believe me until they meet her (and sometimes the wretch then plays the game of "I'm a stuffed parrot and I don't talk", just to make a bigger fool of me).

Apart from the incident mentioned above, we're amazed that in the more than seven years Joey has been part of our mob, she has never bothered to swear. For a while there (when it was fashionable to say it thanks to the Toyota ads) she would come out with "Bugger!" at frighteningly appropriate times, but then she dropped that affectation when the joke got tired. Given that Wayne and I in our natural state are potty mouths, this is too weird - you'd think she'd swear as naturally as we do.

She can mimic both her humans so well that she has each of us fooled. She thinks it's a wonderful joke to make me think that Wayne is yelling for me outside (amazing how she can make it sound distant and urgent, given that her cage is only 15 feet from my desk). There have been many times when we've caught up with each other in exasperation and grumbled "WHAT??", only to find neither of us was calling the other, it was the bird playing us off.

I shudder to think what the baby is going to teach her, and vice versa.

Ahh.. what's that? Silence? After three hours non-stop burblebum has decided she's on a break. I'm going to enjoy the silence while it lasts, because it won't be for long.