Customer Reviews

Compilation of Amazing, Hilarious and Poignant True Parrot Stories

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Compilation of Amazing, Hilarious and Poignant True Parrot Stories I am pleased to have bought this book. The short stories are all interesting, and filled with gems of information about caring for parrots, breeding them and rearing chicks. Great photos.

"Pauline James's Compilation of Amazing, Hilarious and Poignant True Parrot Stories" is the long, but descriptive, title of a charming book by this British author. It includes 64 brief parrot stories, 42 full-color photographs, and numerous black and white photos. The author is a freelance writer for Cage & Aviary Birds, Bird Keeper Magazine, Parrots Magazine, and Australian Bird Keeper, and she has collected stories she has gathered over the years into this one volume.

Chapters include "amazing happenings", "amazing happenings in the wild", "hilarious stories", "extraordinary breeding tales", "escape adventures", overcoming disabilities", and "health and healing". Many of the stories concern breeder birds. While the stories are a little uneven, with some of them seeming to lack a "punch line", there's more than enough in this slim volume to keep the reader entertained and provide a little education. For example, she talks about how African greys celebrate the full moon with song! A colony of caiques in Florida learned to colony-roost like Quaker parakeets. She also talks about how sun conures are hand-raised by villagers in South America, then returned to the wild to live out their lives. While this is touted as benefiting both humans and the birds, it certainly can't be good for the birds to be raised by humans instead of their parents and then released without the knowledge that the parents would pass to their offspring, so I found this story discomfiting, particularly since we now know how endangered the sun conure is.

Not to be missed is the story entitled, "Are Moluccan Cockatoos Nuts?". You may think you know the answer, but you'll need to read the story to see the surprise ending! Also delightful was the story about the cockatiel who made friends with quail, the story about the nanday conure who went to great lengths to get a cheese sandwich, the story about the colony of Quaker parakeets that adopted two nanday conures (all unfortunately intentionally released by a local bird breeder), and the special spiral staircase built by a bird companion for his handicapped Quaker parakeet which had hatched with no claws.

While I have focused on the stories in this book, the photographs are beautiful and greatly enhance the book, as you can imagine from the cover shown. The focus on breeding birds may be a bit off-putting to bird companions in the U.S., but these are clearly the people the author interacted with, so they must be seen in that context.

Very disappointing.

If there was a "hilarious" story in the group, I surely missed it