Curses!

A guy I know fairly well (because he was I) used to make a point to talk a walk during lunch hour in fashionable downtown Towson, Maryland. There was a bar there called The Crease, and in front of the bar, on the sidewalk, in a cage, lived a vociferous parrot.

I've always been interested in animals, especially those that can do more than one thing. For instance, yes it's great that chickens lay eggs, but you show me a Rhode Island Red who can serve up two over easy, and you have my interest.  Or take a meerkat. Sure, they're cute and interesting to watch in their community-building sociology, but you show me a meerkat who can write a coherent plan for reviving an aging building in a seedy neighborhood, and I will support that little critter's efforts.

Parakeets, macaws, cockatoos, and parrots have for years demonstrated the ability not only to speak, but to do so with great diction, pronunciation, and very few errors in grammar. I mean, how much effort would it take to say "Polly wants a cracker" instead of "Polly want a cracker"?

For sheer ability to talk, you can't top the African Grey Parrot, and I believe that was the species of the parrot who worked for The Crease. So easily suggestible was he/she that just having a raffish wag come by every day squawking "Reagan lied! Reagan lied!" was all it took to get him/her to repeat it without prompting, to the immense satisfaction of that doggone wag. At the height of the Iran-Contra Scandal, we foolishly believed that was as bad as things could ever get. Ha ha ha.

Facts about African Grey Parrots

Anyway, over in a wildlife park in Jolly Olde Britain, they had to give the boot to five parrots who could not stop swearing at customers.

This happened at Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in eastern England. The five winged warblers were tossing out expletives and personal descriptions at both visitors to the park and to the very staff charged with bringing them their *@!(!~ dinner. And they had only been there for a few days! Talk about a break-in period.

Steve Nichols is the head man over there, and he reports, "It just went ballistic, they were all swearing. We were a little concerned about the children."

And he got right to the point: "I get called a fat t**t every time I walk past," Nichols complained.

I need someone English to tell me what a t**t is.

These African greys  — Eric, Jade, Elsie, Tyson, and Billy by name — came to the park from five different families, and spent a few days in quarantine together, honing their act before going out in the front of the public. It's hard to imagine someone named "Tyson" breaking bad like that.

But, instead of flying, all they did was fly off the handle, dropping F-bombs along with other stuff. Nichols says the F word was easy for them to learn, but they soon mastered the entire lexicon of the average eighth-grader.

And, let's hear it for the English! The park visitors were tossing invective right back at the birds! "The visitors were giving them as much back as what they were giving to them," Nichols said.

He has to keep the kids in mind, of course, so the park split the five up. They're all in separate quarantine now, in the hopes that they will be more decorous as solo acts.

This is nothing new for the experienced zookeeper: "To take in a swearing parrot isn't an unusual thing; it's something that happens probably three or four times a year," Nichols told CNN.

I should write to Mr Nichols to ask if he heard about the guy whose wife calls him at work to say she had brought home a parrot that used to live in a brothel. The guy gets home, and walks in the kitchen, and the parrot goes, "Oh, hi Frank!"