Parrot Culture. Bruce Thomas Boehrer

parrot was regarded as an upper-class delicacy like caviar, the food of only the highest stratum of Roman society. But the same records also show that even in classical Rome the practice of eating these birds suffered from a very mixed press. Psittacophagy is associated with the effete and idle rich, with jaded palates, and with something like oriental luxury. This last fact is ironic, given Aelian’s insistence that parrots were not eaten in ancient India. Elagabalus, for one, was closely connected with eastern forms of worship and culture, and for Claudian the eating of parrots seems somehow deeply un-Roman: something a degenerate eunuch would do at the court in Constantinople. This most distinctive of Roman dietary practices is already, at least for some Romans, outlandish and loathsome and beyond the pale.

      So what should we make of this contradiction? The opponents of parrot-eating are perhaps easy enough to understand. They have no shortage of reasons to regard the parrot as forbidden flesh. Yet the very qualities that should have rendered it exempt from eating seem somehow to have attracted the parrot-eaters, who seized on it precisely because of its scarcity and beauty and association with foreign lands. And perhaps also because of its voice. It is as if some impulse compelled Roman society to kill and consume the very things it found miraculous.

      Nor has that impulse disappeared, although it takes different forms in contemporary America. We still consume parrots, at least symbolically. A quick visit to online auctions yields mountains of parrotphernalia on sale to the highest bidder, including items depicting the macaws that have become the mascot for Corona beer. In convenience stores we can slake our thirst with cups of a fruit-slush drink called Parrot Ice. Psittacine-theme taverns and eateries range across the United States, from the Green Parrot Bar, founded in 1890 in Key West, Florida, to the Blue Parrot Restaurant in Avalon, California.

      And the urge to kill remains with us too, as illustrated by the case of Chad Alvarez, a twenty-three-year-old senior at the University of Wisconsin. In May 1999, Alvarez, angry at fraternity brother Corey Greenfield for circulating an email at which he took offense, seized Greenfield’s Quaker parrot and placed it in the fraternity’s microwave oven, which he activated with sixty minutes on the timer. The bird, named Iago, exploded before other fraternity members could rescue it. According to Greenfield, the parrot had a vocabulary of about twenty words. When animal-rights activists responded to Alvarez’s deed with outrage, his attorney, Charles Giesen, declared, “Chad has never hurt anybody or anyone before in his life…. He’s a good kid” (Murphy). Two weeks earlier, Alvarez had been arrested on a charge of drunk driving, to which he had entered a plea of no contest. He also pled no contest to charges of theft and animal cruelty for cooking Iago (Chaptman).

      Chapter 2

       Mysteries and Marvels

      The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, avid bird-fancier and leader of the Sixth Crusade, received a diplomatic gift from the Sultan of Babylon that was probably unique in thirteenth-century Europe: an umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) from Indonesia (Streseman 25). Charles IV of France (1322–1328) kept an Alexandrine parakeet in his royal menagerie (Loisel 1:169). By the fifteenth century, parrots inhabited the Vatican.

      These were exceptional cases, however. As a rule, living parrots seldom appear in the historical records of medieval Europe. One ornithologist claims that after the glut of Indian parakeets in Roman times, “all trace of them disappears until the fifteenth century” (Streseman 25). No medieval naturalists complain about the birds’ abundance. No accounts of royal processions involve them. There is, of course, no sign of them being eaten. The story of parrots in medieval Europe is in large part the story of their absence.

      Yet, paradoxically, as they grow less available in the feather, they loom larger in the cultural imagination, often in ways that bear no discernible relation to biological reality. So the story of medieval parrots is one of art, literature, and the birth of a marvelous fiction. Where the ancient Greeks and Romans viewed these birds as somehow both sublime and ridiculous, in the Middle Ages they become less commonplace, less servile, and more magical.

      Of course, it’s easy to overstate the changes that occur from classical times to the Middle Ages. Parrots remained available in medieval Europe and were still prized as pets, although their availability diminished. Likewise, the Middle Ages preserved classical parrot culture but also reinterpreted it in the process, so that the birds of India come increasingly to figure as emblems of the mythic and supernatural.

      For a good example of this process, consider the medieval legacy of Pliny’s Natural History. This is partly what we would now call a work of zoology, but partly also a work of geography. In the Middle Ages, these two aspects of Pliny’s history split into separate literary forms: the bestiary and the travel-narrative. In the process, Pliny’s remarks about parrots undergo embellishment at the same time that they are preserved and repeated.

      On the whole, the bestiaries remain quite faithful to what Pliny wrote, given their complicated history. In design, they served as zoological encyclopedias, dealing with animals both real and imaginary. In the typical bestiary, entries on the hedgehog and weasel and frog stand side by side with those on the parander, monoceros, and manticore, and the parrot’s scarcity in medieval Europe tends to ally it with these latter, fantastic creatures. In derivation, the bestiary is a compendium of beast-lore without identified authors, developing by transmission of material from one copyist to another. The main sources for the form were the great classical works of natural history, especially those by Aristotle and Pliny, supplemented by versions of a late Roman-Greek treatise on beasts, now lost, attributed to a writer called the Physiologus (c. 100–140 A.D.). By the twelfth century, bestiaries circulated throughout Europe, combining the opinions of Aristotle, Pliny, and their fellows with variations on the Physiologus’ work and passages from post-classical authors such as Isidore of Seville and Hugh of Fouilloy.

      Two entries on parrots drawn from English manuscripts typify the bestiary form. In a twelfth-century description:

      It is only from India that one can get a PSITIACUS or Parrot, which is a green bird with a red collar and a large tongue. The tongue is broader than in other birds and it makes distinct sounds with it. If you did not see it, you would think it was a real man talking. It greets people of its own accord, saying “What-cheer?” or “Toodle-oo!” It learns other words by teaching. Hence the story of the man who paid a compliment to Caesar by giving him a parrot which had been taught to say: “I, a parrot, am willing to learn the names of others from you. This I learnt by myself to say—Hail Caesar!”

      A parrot’s beak is so hard that if you throw down the bird from a height on a rock it saves itself by landing on its beak with its mouth tight shut, using the beak as a kind of foundation for the shock. Actually its whole skull is so thick that, if it has to be taught anything, it needs to be admonished with blows. Although it really does try to copy what its teacher is saying, it wants an occasional crack with an iron bar. While young, and up to two years old, it learns what you point out to it quickly enough, and retains it tenaciously; but after that it begins to be distrait and unteachable. (Cambridge University MS 11.4.26, in Book of Beasts 112–114)

      And from the thirteenth century:

      The parrot is only found in India. It is green in colour with a pumice-grey neck and a large tongue which is broader than those of other birds, and which enables it to speak distinct words, so that if you could not see it, you would think that a man was speaking. It will greet you naturally, saying “Ave” or “Chere” (the Latin and Greek words for “Hail”). It learns other words if it is taught them. As the poet says: “Like a parrot I will learn other words from you. I have taught myself to say ‘Hail, Caesar’” [Martial xiv.73]. Its beak is so hard that if it falls from a height on to a stone, it presses on it with its beak and uses it as a kind of protection of extraordinary firmness. Its head is so strong that if you have to teach it with blows while it is learning how to speak to men, you have to strike it with an iron rod. For as long as it is young, not much over two years old, it learns what it is taught quickly and remembers it longer; if it is a little older it is forgetful and difficult to teach. (Oxford University MS Bodley 764, in Bestiary 129)

      These passages offer a literary pastiche that transcends any idea of individual authorship. Both manuscripts