Foul-mouthed parrots have become an attraction in their own right at a zoo in England – but staff are still doing their best to protect young visitors from the birds' swear words.
Lincolnshire Wildlife Park
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Lincolnshire Wildlife Park
Foul-mouthed parrots have become an attraction in their own right at a zoo in England – but staff are still doing their best to protect young visitors from the birds' swear words.
Lincolnshire Wildlife Park
The parrots are a source of swear words. Their habit of spouting profanities at breakneck speed has alternately embarrassed and amused the people who work with them at the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in Friskney, England.
Now the family-friendly zoo is trying out a new plan to tame the parrots' salty language. It's about integrating them into a larger herd where they “hopefully learn all the nicer sounds and words,” Steve Nichols, the park's CEO, told NPR.
But for now, the mundane parrots know no boundaries. Consider how Nichols describes the video link he set up this week. He was preparing to speak to a BBC program after a surge in interest in the park's gray parrots a few days ago.
“The parrot behind me was making some pretty obscene noises during the TV segment,” Nichols said in a video update on Facebook. He considered moving further away from the bird, but that would have disrupted the camera shot, which was carefully trained on Nichols.
“I immediately apologized and said it wasn't my fault if they actually did it [say] a little bit of spanking and banter,” Nichols said.
He needn't have worried. As it turns out, visitors to the zoo, as well as hordes of people online, seem quite willing to accept the parrots as they are, curse words and all. The park has posted a sign near the parrots' habitat warning visitors to expect to hear “every common swear word” and to keep children away from the area.
Still, Nichols says, the park's human staff enjoy the lighter side of the birds' unique language — and the international media attention they receive.
“Staff find it hilarious that they see the birds they care for on broadcasts around the world,” Nichols said, adding that his colleagues receive messages from relatives living abroad saying they have Lincolnshire Park on their local news see.
It's not the first time that the parrots have caused a stir. When five foul-mouthed African gray parrots – Billy, Elsie, Eric, Jade and Tyson – were donated to the park at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, staff resorted to keeping them out of public places to keep them out of earshot. There are currently about eight birds in the park that would require explicit voice cues.
“The imitative abilities of gray parrots have been praised at least since Aristotle,” says a scientific paper from 2010, which examined their ability to learn and reproduce voices.
All of this raises a key question: are the parrots teaching each other all these swear words? Or does the obscenity come from people?
“It’s certainly people-related,” Nichols said. “And what makes it even funnier is that this particular species actually accurately recreates the person's voice.”
To illustrate his point, he tells the story of the lady who spoke to him about donating her parrot. Her husband taught the bird all the curse words he knew, she said.
There was just one catch, Nichols said.
“It was pretty easy to hear that she wasn't telling the whole truth because her voice was cursing.”