Parrot Train Talk: Achieving Verbal Communication with a Parrot

When learning to parrot train talk you should know that even while it is still inside the egg, a baby parrot may verbally communicate its need for the parents to provide food and care.

Failure to do so, especially just after hatching, results in death by neglect—swift elimination of nonverbal babies from the gene pool.

This natural selection process ensures an adult individual who can find its mate and flock when separated, communicate safety, alarm, and an unknown number of other messages to its peers.

Although much remains to be learned about why, how, and what parrots communicate verbally, we know that their ability to verbalize is not limited to communication in their own language—that they can and do learn other animal languages as well as human language.

Studies done by Dr. Irene Pepperberg with African grey parrots are particularly startling, revealing even an ability to understand numbers.

Those who live with talking pets spend many happy hours exchanging stories about profound words from feathered friends.

These "talking-bird people" are surprisingly like their parrots—highly communicative, frequently possessing exaggerated verbal tendencies. Like all effective communicators, they take the time to talk to friends, family, and birds.

I believe that with parrot train talk verbal communication skills are an important step in achieving an effective relationship with a parrot. It is possible and important to relate vocally with birds both through human speech and with their own language.

Birds spend a large portion of their lives scolding, chattering, and singing to each other.

They bill and coo, scream and curse. They are particularly vocal in territorial disputes, but even when comfortable in their own space, they are famous for generating great volumes of sound (some people even call it noise). They are most likely to try to communicate verbally when separated from their "flock"—when they can hear, but not see their companions.

To establish a verbally interactive human/avian relationship, begin by trying to understand and responding to the bird's sounds.

Speak the bird's language: When you spend time with a "pre-speech" bird, there are certain sounds it makes when presented with particular stimuli.

An African grey may "click" when it sees that favorite toy on the floor. A budgie or Amazon may "trill" to the hair dryer or "tut, tut, tut, tut" to the reflection in the mirror.

If you can reproduce the situation by making the same sound as the bird, then enticing the bird to repeat the sound, you have made a major communication breakthrough. You have modeled a behavior for the bird, then stimulated the bird to mimic the behavior.

Tell stories when parrot train talk: A companion bird loves to be entertained with stories—particularly if it hears its own name in that story.

"Once upon a time, there was a pudgy, green Amazon named Portia. One day, when Portia was only a naked nestling, he fell from the tree where his mother had laid him…”

It may not really matter what words come between the "Portia's," but a steady stream of words in a friendly tone, freely interspersed with the bird's name, will capture its curiosity and establish direct, personal communication.

Be redundant: A companion parrot will usually pick up the word it hears most frequently, usually, a greeting. "Hello" in English is sometimes a little difficult for a bird to master, so try the Spanish greeting, "Hola" (pronounced "Oh la"), or the more continental "Ciao" (pronounced "Chow"). Birds usually repeat single-syllable greetings first—"What," "Hi," Ciao,"—followed later by "Hello" and "What' cha doin'?"

After the parrot train talk greeting, the next most frequently repeated word in the household is often the name of a child or another pet. Yellow napes are famous for making everybody crazy by calling children or other pets in the mother's voice. They love "itty" sounds, like "pretty bird" and "itty, bitty, pretty one." A large number of talking companion parrots say "Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty."

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