Parrots are entertaining and lovable. They have to be or you’d wring their necks when once again you discover something they chewed up they weren’t supposed to have. African Grays are amazingly destructive little terrors with that 5-year-old intelligence and 2-year old’s emotional level. It’s like having an extra smart tot around perpetually in the Terrible Two’s.

Take the other evening for instance, when I was busy working on my desktop computer in the office while The Farmer was watching a movie on tv. All of a sudden I heard him exclaim, “Where did you come from?”

When I went to investigate, it seems my parrot went walkabout and had walked from one side of the house to the other, crept across the floor of the den, then crawled up the side of his recliner without him ever knowing she was anywhere close.

The Farmer and The Parrot

I snapped this picture before I returned the parrot to her cage. She and the Farmer have an ongoing love-to-hate-ya relationship, so I felt it best to separate them.  (You notice he has his arm put down away from the bird!)

Then just yesterday, at the same time I was pulling my hair out over a messed up blog, I was bombing our basement. Got to take my frustrations out somehow, right?

Well, actually, we’ve had some trouble with little spiders in the Cave Geeks space. We tried glue traps and spraying, but that didn’t have much effect. I figured a bug bomb ought to do the trick, and would not only get rid of spiders, but any other creepy crawlies that found their way in. So when the guys left for work Monday morning, I got bombed. Oh wait, that’s not quite right…

Okay, so what I really did was set off the bug bomb in the basement. Now that space is right under the parrot’s cage, with a couple of vents nearby. Since birds are sensitive to air pollutants (think miner’s and their canaries), I figured I’d better move her outside for the duration.

I set her travel cage on a table on the back porch, carried her out there and locked her up.

There’s a dog door to the porch, and Toby the Wonder Dog comes and goes as he pleases. He decided to come up on the porch and investigate. The parrot took exception to this.

Just in case you didn’t realize it, that is NOT the dog growling in the first half of that video. That is the PARROT growling at the dog, then saying, “What?” a couple of times.

How’s that for a turnaround? I’d never heard her do that, and have no idea where she learned it or how she knew to growl at the dog…

But it sure was funny!

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