Tape Recorders With Feathers

I've had budgies (aka parakeets) most of my life. All of them but the short-lived Pip were prodigious talkers. When some folks get over being surprised--"Parakeets talk?"--they most often ask, "How do you get them to talk?"

As far as I'm concerned, how do you keep them from talking? Budgies are psittacines, members of the parrot family, natural mimics. But that's only part of the equation. You have to talk back! No sticking them in one room away from the family, or leaving them to be decorative. A budgie thrives best being what he is, a small feathered person, talked to as if you would talk to another member of the family.

Once the little guy is comfy with you, you can of course try to teach him to say something. It may not always come out the way you planned. My mom, I have recounted, tried to teach Frisky to say "I love you" and what he learned was "What?" I instructed both Sylvester and Merlin in "Merry Christmas"; both said "Merry Chrisbird" instead.

And of course they really don't usually know what they're saying. Merlin managed to figure out "Hi" was a greeting word, but that's not the norm.

Bandit has continually surprised me. He picks up words easily and willy-nilly, like a tiny tape recorder. When we have to discipline the dog and send her to "time out" in her crate, we say, "Willow, go to your box!" Bandit now says "Go to your box!" Occasionally Willow will vanish and one of us will say "Where's the dog?" Bandit now declares as we do when we find her, "There she is!" Before leaving in the morning, I tell him "I've got to go earn seed." He now tells me, as well as "It's time to go s'eep!" when I reach for his cage cover. We have talked so much about our overflow of junk e-mail that he pipes up "That's spam!" And when he learns a new word, you will hear it sometimes up to ten times in a minute. They practice, too!

So when we decided this year to stay home for Christmas, a great deal of our conversation revolved around the "all dark-meat" turkey we were planning to have (legs, wings, and thighs). At least we must have talked about it a lot. Bandit's new favorite word is now "turkey." And I wish he wouldn't say it so much--he's making me hungry!

While he never did venture into "Merry Christmas" (or "Merry Chrisbird"), the one thing I did teach him to say was "I am not a chicken!" There was a time he got downright vociforous about it: "I'm not a chicken! I'm not a chicken! I'm not a chicken!" The funny thing is that sometimes he plugs a different word in one of his phrases--and what is really odd is that he never plugs in the wrong type of word. Nouns always replace nouns. I've never heard him say "I seed not a chicken." He earns seed.

And he has not been, in turn, a computer or a budgerigar--or spam--besides not being a chicken.

(The first time he said, "I'm not spam," I didn't blink an eyelash. I simply replied, "Of course not, sweetie. Spam is pork. You're poultry.")

So it didn't surprise me at all, but I did laugh, when I covered up his cage last night, when he solemnly told me, "I am not a turkey!"

The one thing a budgie is truly not...is dull.

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 3:15:00 PM

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