African Grey Parrots also learn to imitate the sounds around them, sometimes to the annoyance of members of the household who cannot distinguish between the ring of the telephone and the Grey’s imitation. A Grey Parrots in my possession would imitate to perfection the radio time signals and the squeaking of the door of a cooker. Many Greys Parrots are adept at whistling tunes, for whistling is part of their natural range of calls.
The Duke of Bedford (1930) recorded an instance of mimicry of sound and action. His aviaries were being dismantled for removal, involving `much hammering on wood, wire and corrugated iron constantly going on, as the carpenters engage in their work’. He was surprised to hear, issuing from the aviary containing his Grey Parrots:
… the typical sounds of carpentering proceeding therefrom, though no human agent was in view. Looking inside I saw the Parrot with her head bent right over, giving her perch five or six hard taps with the culmen of her beak, then turning to one side and repeating the action on the wire and iron to produce the necessary variation in sound. The time and rhythm were perfect in each case!
Grey Parrots are among the most perceptive and intelligent of birds but many are also rather sensitive and highly strung and a relatively small proportion become very tame. However, this is in many cases the fault of the owner as much depends on his or her patience and the amount of time devoted to the bird, as well as its age on acquisition. Nevertheless, there can never have been so many cherished pets among parrots as Greys. They can be the most delightful companions imaginable and their intelligence is a constant source of wonder.
No one should consider keeping one of these birds unless he or she is able to devote much time to it every day. This, of course, applies to all tame parrots but a bored or neglected Grey will soon resort to feather plucking which is extremely difficult or impossible to cure. Under the same circumstances, Amazon Parrots, for example, rarely remove their feathers. The vast majority of parrots which remove their feathers are Greys, macaws and cockatoos and I feel it is significant that this problem occurs most frequently in the most intelligent species.
Until comparatively recently, most of the Greys exported from Africa were destined to become pets, only those which proved impossible to tame going to aviculturists. In the latter category are birds known as ‘growlers’. Their fear of people is so great that whenever someone approaches their cage, they make a continuous growling sound. It is almost impossible to tame adult birds which are growlers and as it causes such birds great stress to be closely confined, they are suitable only for aviaries. Young growlers can be tamed but it is a long process and one which requires long suffering patience. The average person does not have the ability or patience to tame such a bird and should not allow a dealer to persuade him or her otherwise.
From the mid-1970s the number of Greys and other parrots exported from their native countries decreased greatly, so that the demand for young Greys as pets could not be met, with the inevitable result that the prices of these birds and other parrots reached record peaks.
The aviculturist with several birds has a fair chance of eventually being able to supply the pet market with a useful number of birds annually. The record produced by one pair of Greys must surely be that held by the late Mrs Velma Hart of Long Beach, California, a renowned breeder of parrots. Her pair produced 87 chicks between 1962 and 1974. This number was, of course, achieved by removing the young for hand-rearing, thus inducing the female to lay again.
Breeders should note the advice which Mrs Hart wrote:
Those who intend to breed parrots must have patience. The birds must be given good food and privacy – and nature seems to take care of the rest. For African Grey Parrots, I provide nest-boxes 31 cm (12 in) square and 61 cm (2 ft) deep.
Many people cannot wait for the birds to breed. They move them or change the nest. They try to improve things but only upset the birds and delay them nesting.
I feel that this is especially good advice where Grey Parrots are concerned because these birds are very suspicious and dislike change of any kind.