Fun & Interesting Facts About Parrots

Birds are Australia’s fourth favourite pet after cats, dogs and fish. Nearly 5.6 million birds are living as pets throughout Australia, a huge number of them are parrots. And why not? With their acrobatic antics, captivating colours and often funny personalities, parrots are tough to resist.

Parrots as pets can be great, however, for individuals more familiar with fluffy four-legged pals, they can offer some unforeseen challenges. These intelligent, long-living and highly social birds require particularly great amounts of enrichment and attention, or else they may develop bad habits and get stressed and bored to the level where they start plucking out their own feathers.

Enjoy these 6 fun and interesting facts about parrots.

Parrots are omnivores

Most parrots are omnivores and would eat almost anything – seeds, nuts, fruit, insects and also meat. Few species such as the rainbow-coloured lories and South Pacific lorikeets feed on nectar only with brush-tipped tongues, although in the recent past, even they were observed eating meat at Australian feeding stations. Native keas were first noticed attacking and praying sheep in New Zealand in 1868 and were hunted for being sheep-killers until 1986 when the government announced them a protected species. 

Parrots use their feet for eating

All birds come with great grip, however, only parrots hold food up to its beak when eating. They are able to hold their food with their feet/claws and then take it up to the beak so they may take small bites of it.

Actually, they eat in a similar fashion as we humans do. Parrot’s fleshy toes work pretty much just as how our fingers do.

Parrots are great at imitating sounds

One behaviour that makes them popular pets is their ability to hear and imitate sounds. Not only can they learn or imitate sounds of other creatures, they are able to imitate various natural noises and also human speech. Parakeets, African grey parrots, macaws and Amazon parrots are the most skilful at copying sounds. In record, an African grey parrot could speak more than 100 words.

Parrots live a long life

The lifespan of parrots varies throughout species. However, some parrots may live longer than their owners. Although small parrots live generally for 15 to 20 years, medium-sized ones live for about 25 to 30 years, and large ones can get up to 80 years. The oldest parrot that made a record was a cockatoo, called Cookie, and was 82 yrs old when it died in 2016. Incredible!

They choose a partner for life

When a female and male parrot get together, then they literally stay together, even when it is not breeding season. They get separated only if they fail to give birth or any one of them dies. It is the job of a male to woo a female parrot. The male does a courtship display where he dances, parades around and makes various sounds and expressions to impress her.