(Newswire.net — October 16, 2014) — A Californian pet parrot that spoke with a British accent when it disappeared, returned to its owner four years later. However, Nigel — an African gray parrot — now speaks Spanish.
Veterinarian Teresa Micco tracked Nigel’s microchip to Darren Chick, a Brit who lives in Torrance, Cal.
“I introduced myself and said, ‘Have you lost a bird?'” Micco told the newspaper. “He initially said, ‘No.’ But he thought I meant recently.” He said his bird went missing four years earlier.
No one knows if Nigel went to, for example, Acapulco and how and why he returned, but Chick says the bird’s British accent is gone, and it now chatters in Spanish.
“It’s really weird. I knew it was him from the minute I saw him.” Chick told the newspaper.
Despite the fact that Nigel bit his owner when he first tried to pick him up, the reunion was very emotional for Chick who admits that he shed a tear.
However, the biting behavior is not unusual and Nigel should settle back in soon enough, Micco said.
Meanwhile, Dr. Micco, has been running ads for her own missing parrot named Benjamin for nine months, since he flew the coop in February and darted out a door that was left open.
After seeing one of her ads, Julissa Sperling mistaking the missing Benjamin for Nigel brought him to Micco.
“He was the happiest bird. He was singing and talking without control,” Sperling said. “He was barking like the dogs. I’m from Panama and he was saying, ‘What happened?’ in Spanish.”
There is debate within the scientific community over whether some talking parrots also have some cognitive understanding of the language. Some birds, like the corvids, are able to mimic only a few words and phrases, and some budgerigars have a vocabulary of almost 2,000 words. Wild cockatoos in Australia have been reported to have learned human speech by cultural transmission from ex-captive birds that have integrated into the flock.