The Parrot Says …

I haven’t yet written about the menagerie here, but I’m going to sneak this post in anyway.

The lodge family includes one dog, a cat, and five parrots. Three are red-naped green parrrots, and two are yellow-naped ones. The yellows can talk. Patience, who is the oldest and best trained yellow, is the most vocal. She’s also the most particular. She likes men. She has a nasty habit of attacking women’s faces with a bloodlust, so we don’t handle her when the owners are gone. Pita, our younger yellow, is from this year’s brood. We handle her every day to socialize her and keep her sweet. So far, she does not attack. This is good.

Patience has a huge vocabulary of human words, phrases, whistles, and miscellaneous sounds. She says a lot of common phrases such as “How you doin?” and “pretty bird.” She also has some funny ones, such as “Wanna get the bird out?” Usually, she says these in the voice of the person who taught them to her. However, sometimes, she picks up phrases that we can’t figure out.

This is a short video that Jeff took of Patience last week. You can also see a short snippet of me trying to get Pita out of her cage at the end.

The question here is: What is Patience saying? My closest approximation is “I think Iraq is really a 12-year deal.” This seems pretty advanced (not to mention political) for a parrot, and we don’t know where she would have learned it. Kevin thinks she's saying something else.

What do you think she’s saying? I’d love to hear your interpretation. Leave a comment!