Parrot Culture. Bruce Thomas Boehrer

a discussion of the eared owl by noting that “in general all the crook-taloned birds are short-necked and flat-tongued and given to mimicry. For such too is the Indian bird, the parrot, that is said to be human-tongued (and it becomes even more outrageous after drinking wine)” (597b.25–30). This brief remark is likely a later addition to Aristotle’s work, either by the philosopher himself or by another hand. In any case it is grounded in hearsay rather than direct experience. The allegation of drunkenness, as one classicist has remarked, is “a criticism no bird ever deserved from a human being” (Dalby 193). But hearsay or not, Aristotle’s mention of parrots proves most durable, both in its details (the observation about wine is echoed for centuries to come) and in its general features.

      Among the latter, Aristotle’s tendency to anthropomorphize parrots proves especially influential, most obviously in the remark about wine. Parrots may eat fermented fruit in the wild, and in past centuries have been fed a mixture of wine-soaked bread called “parrot soup,” but when given a choice, they don’t seem given to drink. I’ve even put the matter to the test (purely in the interests of scholarship, of course) by tempting my two Amazon parrots with a small but discerning selection of red and white wines, including an Australian chardonnay, a Chilean cabernet, an Oregon pinot noir, and a vernaccia from San Gemignano. They turned up their beaks at the lot.

      But beyond the question of parrots and alcohol, Aristotle describes the bird as “human-tongued,” while nonetheless noting that other birds, too, are capable of mimicry. This fact implies a lasting distinction; mynahs, jackdaws, and jays may be able to imitate human speech, but historically the parrot emerges as western culture’s articulate bird par excellence, its eloquence rendering it by coincidence more human than the rest. Why should this be so? In part, perhaps, this status derives from the exceptional degree of the parrot’s ability as mimic, which extends in present-day cases to the singing of opera and the conduct of seemingly meaningful conversation.³ But other things, too, render many parrot species exceptional. Their gaudy appearance immediately captures attention, as does their exoticism (from the western point of view, at least). Their longevity endows them with a life-cycle of human proportions. Around A.D. 425, the historian Olympiodorus wrote with wonder about a parrot “with whom he had lived for twenty years, so that it had learned almost every human action that could be imitated” (Müller 4:65; my translation). And then there is their obvious intelligence. In Aristotle, for the first time, we see certain of these factors (the articulateness and exoticism) combine to produce a bird that also seems to participate, to a limited extent, in the human condition.

      So if it becomes possible to view parrots as in some ways almost human, it also becomes possible, in the process, to view them as possessing, and as typifying, a supposedly inferior humanity. In the context of ancient imperial aspirations, the parrot can emerge by this calculus as a sort of servant-figure, offering a symbolic compensation for the existence of unconquered foreign lands (we don’t have India, but its birds pay us homage) and also offering an apparently natural model for the inferiority of foreign and subordinate peoples (they’re more like parrots than like us and therefore should obey us). Following Aristotle in this spirit, Pliny the elder declares in his Natural History (completed A.D. 77) that

      above all else, parrots mimic the human voice and indeed are even capable of conversation. India sends us the bird, which the Indians call “siptacis.” Its entire body is green, set off with a vermilion collar about its neck. It salutes emperors and repeats the words it hears, being especially outrageous in its speech when drunk with wine. Its head is as hard as its beak, and is beaten with an iron rod when one teaches the bird to speak, for it feels no other blows. When it flies down from a perch, it catches and supports itself with its beak, making itself lighter because of the weakness of its feet. (10.58.117; my translation)

      The description here is sketchy, but it seems to be aimed at depicting parrots as miniature people. Aristotle’s anecdote about psittacine drunkenness persists, supplemented by other observations that implicitly cast the bird as a servant. It greets emperors, sports a collar about its neck that might call to mind the similar collars worn by Roman slaves, and sustains regular beatings with an iron rod, without which it would prove impervious to learning. And in fact, far from being a confirmable detail, this last point—like Aristotle’s charges of drunk and disorderly behavior—flies in the face of experience. Parrots are wild animals at heart even now, when many are bred in captivity, and they most certainly were so in Pliny’s day. Training them well cannot be done by physical violence, which will drive them into terror and psychosis. To teach a parrot to talk, one must on the contrary form a close personal bond with it, and the resulting intimacy can easily defy any distinction between master and pet. Over the years I have taught various parrots to whistle, speak, and sing. In turn, they have encouraged me to cluck, squawk, and hiss—responses to which I now find myself instinctively resorting in sometimes inappropriate circumstances, as for instance during faculty meetings. But for Pliny, the articulate birds of India exist in large part to confirm the cultural ideals of the Roman imperium, and these have more to do with hierarchy and subordination than with intimacy and mutuality.

      Likewise, in another passing mention of the birds (Letters 4.2.3), Pliny notes that the unscrupulous advocate Marcus Aquilius Regulus has lost his son, whom he treated while alive with “a disgusting show of indulgence, quite unnatural in a parent…. Now that his son is dead he mourns with wild extravagance. The boy used to possess a number of Gallic ponies for riding and driving, also dogs of all sizes, and nightingales, parrots, and blackbirds; Regulus had them all slaughtered round his pyre. That was not grief, but parade of grief.” Pliny disapproves of the ostentation with which Regulus mourns his son, but the funerary slaughter of animals nonetheless makes sense in a mental environment that views them as living property. The inappropriateness of such slaughter in this case becomes a matter of decorum, not of social, political, ethical, or ecological principle. Regulus is guilty not of despotism or cruelty or wanton destructiveness, but of bad taste.

      For its part, Pliny’s discussion of parrots in the Natural History is echoed and enlarged by later writers of natural history such as Apuleius (c. A.D. 165) and Solinus (early third century A.D.). For instance, Apuleius observes that

      the parrot is a bird of India. Its height is very slightly smaller than that of doves, but its color is not that of doves, for it is not milk-white or lead-grey or both, or speckled pale yellow, but the parrot’s color is green from its innermost feathers to its outermost wing-tips, except that it is distinguished by its neck alone. For its neck is collared and crowned with a crimson band as bright as a circle of twisted gold. Its beak is of the first order of hardness; when it flies down in excitement upon a rock from a very high perch, it catches itself with its beak as with an anchor. But the hardness of its head is equal to that of its beak. When it is compelled to imitate our language, its head is struck repeatedly with an iron rod so that it might begin to perceive the authority of its teacher; in teaching, this is called a ferrule.

      However, as a young bird it learns quickly until it reaches two years of age, while its mouth is soft so that it might be adapted to speech, and while its tongue is tender so that it might be taught to echo; but an old bird, when captured, is intractable and forgetful. In truth, a parrot is more easily brought to learn human speech when it eats nuts and when its feet, like those of a man, bear five little toes. For that is not a characteristic of all parrots, but it is proper to all of them to have a broader tongue than other birds, and they pronounce human words with their more open plectrum and palate. Indeed, what the parrot has learned, it sings, or rather speaks, so similarly to us that if you were to hear its voice, you would think it a person. On the other hand, if you were to hear a crow, it would approximate, not speak, the words. Yet both the crow and the parrot say nothing more than what they have learned. If you teach it to curse, it will curse by day and by night, making a great clamor with its railing; this is a song to it, and it thinks it is singing. When it has run through all the curses it has learned, then it starts the song all over again. If you want it not to speak, its tongue must be cut out, or it must be sent back to its forests as soon as possible. (12; my translation)

      To my mind, this is the best description of parrots to survive from ancient times, and it corrects a certain amount of the misinformation that precedes it. For instance, although Apuleius, like Pliny, maintains that parrots must be beaten while learning to talk,