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TEACHING YOUR PARROT TO TALK
By Margaret T. Wright
 Margaret
T. Wright, MBA
Maggie Wright is a marketing consultant and the creator/publisher
of the African Grey magazine, The Grey Play Round Table®. Visit her web
site at: http://www.africangreys.com
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It’s 5:30 AM and my alarm goes off.... "What does the rooster say? Er,
Er, ...Er, Er!!!" It’s not the usual alarm, but it’s Merlin Tewillager,
my African Grey Parrot, telling me it’s time to get up to feed the backyard
birds and to prepare her morning "cereal’k" (that’s seven grain cereal
and rice milk). She and her Grey sister, Sweet Pea, peep through the covers
of their sleeping cages to see if I’m obeying their commands. "Maggie,
Up, Up!" says Merlin while Sweet Pea whistles her favorite bird sound, "Aw!
Aw!" the crow. It’s 5:45 AM and I have no choice but to get up. Living
with talking birds can be exhilarating, but it also can be exhausting!
Merlin Tewillager has an extensive vocabulary of over 100 words and phrases.
She can give her name and seven animal sounds, on command, most of the time:
the rooster, the cat, the dog, the duck, the horse, the crow and the PIG. She
has learned that if she gives the right animal sound, she gets applause, but
if she gives the wrong answer, she gets laughter; so she mixes up her responses,
depending on her mood. Her favorite is the PIG because of the heavy laughter
she gets when she makes the sound as a wrong answer. There is so much strategy
in her decisions about which answer to give...the right one?.... the wrong
one?.... the PIG?
Although most Greys tend to be shy around strangers, making
the "pet human" appear a fool when his great talking parrot says
nothing, Merlin does perform in public. I believe she does so because I traveled
a lot with her while she was young and she learned to "control crowds" by
performing the animal sounds.
Merlin learned to mimic the animal sounds by observation.
Before Sweet Pea came to live with us, Merlin and I went with a friend and
her dog Rags on a weekend excursion to her parents’ house. Rags incessantly
barked in a pen under Merlin’s window. When we returned, Merlin kept barking....so
I asked, "What does the doggie say?" Every time she barked in response
to my question, I got so excited that she thought she had won the lottery.
Then on subsequent trips I introduced her to the other animal sounds.
The African Grey is considered to be the best talking parrot,
followed by some Amazon parrot species. But many other birds can talk too:
some budgerigars, macaws, cockatoos, cockatiels, lovebirds, lorikeets and conures,
to name a few. Within talking species, some individual birds can be bigger
talkers than others. Learning the first word is usually the most difficult
task. We found in a survey conducted on our web site that the majority of Greys
say "hello" as their first word, but Merlin’s was "wow!" Here
are a few tips I’ve learned for teaching your parrot to talk:
- From the moment it comes home with you, talk with your new parrot companion.
Talk about everything you’re doing....explain everything to it, as if talking
with a child, but not in a child-like voice.
- Teach by association. Use the same basic phrase for the same task. For
example, in teaching it to request food, use the same request phrase, such
as "want," "Want some apple, want some squash," and so
on.
- However, don’t bore your parrot by repeating the same phrase over and over.
If you’re teaching a specific object, you may want to talk about it using
different contexts. For example, "Want a red apple? Here’s the red apple.
Hmmmm, delicious red apple, it’s good!"
- If you use recordings, don’t play them longer than 15 minutes at a time
and be there to interact with the recordings and your bird. The more you
interact and participate in the learning process with your bird, the more
it will learn.
- Create specific daily training sessions for specific phrases you want to
teach. Select a period when your bird is the most expressive, and keep the
lessons short, no longer than 15 or 20 minutes.
- Observe your bird and identify things that interest him in his environment,
and talk with him about them. For example, if your parrot enjoys watching
the backyard birds, spend time watching with him and talking about the different
birds.
- Don’t push your bird to learn too many phrases at once, but work with a
few, so that he can focus on the tonality of what he’s learning to say. For
example, Merlin speaks in a "computer-like" voice because she learned
so many phrases at once that she did not spend as much time learning how
to replicate my voice.
Talking birds can be funny, exciting and entertaining; but
that’s nothing compared to the love they give. Aren’t we lucky?
©2000 Margaret T. Wright
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