Believe it or not, a UK zoo suspended a group of five parrots from public view after a shocking stream of curses and profanities were hurled at visitors. According to the park’s management the foul-mouthed birds started teaching each other curses while quarantined in the same room at the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park last August.
The 5 are African grey parrots named Elsie, Eric, Billy, Tyson, and Jade, and started encouraging one another to swear. They had joined a colony of about 200 other grey parrots. CEO Steve Nichols said in an interview, “We saw it very quickly, we are quite used to parrots swearing but we’ve never had five at the same time.” He added, “Most parrots clam up outside, but for some reason these five relish it.”
In a separate interview, the CEO explained that other parrots taken in by the park displayed “blue language” and were quite “comical”, but these five just took it to another level, and things just escalated to a situation beyond the park’s control. “We took in five in the same week and because they were all quarantined together, it meant that one room was just full of swearing birds.” he mentioned.
Nichols added, “The more they swear the more you usually laugh which then triggers them to swear again.” He continued, “But when you get four or five together that have learned the swearing and naturally learnt the laughing, so when one swears, one laughs and before you know it, it just got to be like an old working men’s club scenario where they are all just swearing and laughing.”
With the lifting of health restrictions, the park reopened and put the parrots on display. But to everyone’s surprise, they started cursing at the visitors. However the visitors did not seem to mind, and some actually enjoyed the cacophony of verbal abuse. “Literally within 20 minutes of being in the introductory we were told that they had sworn at a customer and for the next group of people, all sorts of obscenities came out,” Steve Nichols explains. “People have come to us, they think it’s highly amusing, we haven’t had one complaint,” he adds. “When a parrot tells you to f**k off it amuses people very highly…It’s brought a big smile to a really hard year.”
Amusing, maybe, but the decision to withdraw the parrots from public view was made, especially for the sake of children. The “notorious” five were placed in an enclosure with other parrots where park officials hope the other noises will have a positive effect on the birds. But, with over 1,500 birds in the park, the last thing they want is for the cursing to catch on.
The five will eventually be released in separate areas of the park, so at least if they continue to curse, it won’t be as bad as a group cursing. But it makes you wonder where these parrots learned to curse in the first place?
Lincolnshire zoo had another parrot that made headlines before. Chico, a 9-year old yellow-crowned Amazon parrot took centerstage with footage that went viral of the bird singing Beyonce’s If I Were A Boy. That was devoid of curses surely.
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