Preface
Fowl Language
Whenever my wife Barbara and I traveled from our home in Maine, we boarded our parakeet, Gus, at a local veterinarian’s clinic. We came to refer to this as Gus “going to camp.”
Birds don’t chirp happily unless they feel comfortable and secure in a situation, and they usually don’t talk unless they feel relaxed—at least that was true of Gus—so it wasn’t hard to tell that Gus was perfectly comfortable at the vet’s. Oftentimes, the moment we carried him into the building in his cage and he saw where he was, he gave each person he encountered a loud “greeting-call” chirp. Within a minute or two he was typically chirping away or talking. Barbara and I felt better about leaving Gus in a place where he clearly felt so much at home.
Since Gus came self-contained in his own cage, the women who ran the clinic put his cage in the waiting room near the front desk. With most birds this would not be a problem. But Gus was not most birds.
One day, a woman who was waiting while her dog was being examined approached Gus’s cage. A sign on the cage read: hi, i’m gus, i’m boarding. Gus had been twittering away, but as the woman came close to the cage, he became silent and sidestepped along his perch away from her until he was next to the far wall.
With her face pressed almost against the bars of the cage the woman said, “You’re such a pretty bird!”
“You’re such a nauseous bitch!” Gus replied.
The woman recoiled, stunned at having been addressed in English by such a small creature, and, if you will, in utterly foul language.
“Did you hear what that bird just said to me?” the woman asked the veterinarian’s assistant behind the counter, her shock and annoyance clear from her tone.
“He said ‘nacho chip,’” the quick-witted assistant answered. At which point Gus repeated the words “nauseous bitch.” The assistant stood up from her desk, picked up the cage, and whisked the offending bird into the back room with the dogs until the woman had left.
Upon returning from our trip, we went to pick up Gus. When we walked into the waiting room, we immediately noticed that Gus’s cage, which had stood on a table in the middle of the room, was nowhere in sight. We were tremendously upset, thinking he had died. But the vet’s assistant assured us that Gus was alive and well, although he had presented a “behavior problem,” as she put it, and so had been moved to the back room where the dogs were boarded.
“‘Behavior problem’?” we asked.
“With bad language,” the assistant said, and told us what had happened.
What made Gus say “You’re such a nauseous bitch” to the woman? He couldn’t have heard that exact sentence before (neither Barbara nor I would have said that), though he would have heard all those words individually. Why would Gus choose to put together that particular combination of words, in just that order? And why would he do it at that exact moment in time?
This book is about Gus, and about Barbara’s and my relationship with him. How I went from not wanting him to desperately wanting him to live much longer than his all-too-brief five years. How he went from being a questionable boarder to being the master of the estate, from a distant acquaintance to the best of friends, from a silent presence to the speaker of words of wisdom.
It has now been over two decades since Gus’s death, and we still talk about him—his assertiveness, his empathy, his intelligence. In my thirty years of psychotherapy practice as a clinical psychologist, I was always amazed by how many of my patients said they were helped by my stories about Gus.
Now, at this point I suspect that readers will be skeptical. How could a tiny (1.4-ounce) bird be so influential? The short answer is that he was highly social and affectionate, with an uncanny ability to “read” humans and connect with us emotionally—with a few notable and embarrassing exceptions.
Parrots are known to mimic human language, allegedly “parroting” only what they hear. The received wisdom is that they don’t understand what they say, and they can’t say anything new or original. Although Gus engaged in mere mimicry, he also at times demonstrated an understanding of what we said to him. Most surprising, he combined his ever-growing English vocabulary into novel phrases and sentences that fit different situations remarkably well.
Although I wrote a draft of this book a couple of years after Gus died in 2000, the COVID-19 pandemic gave me the time I needed to put it into final form. Much to my regret, I never had the forethought to audio or video record him (though I did take several photos; this was before smartphones with video recorders). So I can appreciate any and all skepticism.
After you read my accounts of what Gus did and said, you can then make up your own mind about their veracity. There is also an Appendix, written by Barbara, in which she recommends additional readings about some of the scientific findings regarding avian intelligence, including the extraordinary linguistic abilities of certain kinds of birds. Beyond that, all I have are Barbara’s and my (and several others’) reports of Gus’s adventures in life, at home and at the veterinarian office where we boarded him when we traveled.
And even I will admit that some of it seems to strain credulity.
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