A Wonderful Parrot.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 460, 5 April 1890, Page 4

A Wonderful Parrot.

THE EARLY TRAINING AND LATER DEEDS AND SAYINGS OF ‘ PUNCH.’

[Copyright, 1890, by the Author.]

Looking out of the window of a room in which I write, I see beyond my modest garden a stretch of meadow land ; then comes a dusty country road, and beyond the road a white house with green shutters. It is the hottest part of the day, and no living creature is in sight save an extremely tired and disreputable-looking dog, who is painfully toiling through the clouds of dust he is himself raising. I watch his progress with a faint interest, for he is an acquaintance of mine, and, being somewhat familiar with his habits, I know he is on his way to the river, there to enjoy a refreshing swim, followed by an invigorating chase after the delusive water-rat who lives by the wharf. I am moved to gentle envy of my acquaintance, whose name is Stump, not alone because he is going for a dip, but because he can take it without those conventional shackles which we call collectively a bath-ing-suit. Stump travels slowly onward until he is abreast of the white house with green shutters. Then he stops, and though it is too far for me to see clearly, I know perfectly well that he is cocking up one of his artificially sharpened ears. At the same instant I hear a strident voice with a touch of querulousness in it cry ‘Stump! Stump!’ and this it is that makes my friend the bullterrier pause. He is about resuming his course when the cry is repeated, * Stump ! Come here, I say ! Stump !’ This time there is no room tor doubt in the dog’s mind ; he turns towards the gate, for surely, thinks he, the master must be calling him, though why the said master should be in a neighbour’s house in place of his own the canine intellect cannot quite understand. Speculation on this point is postponed, however, when the voice with familiar accentuation cries, ‘ Cats, Stump ! Cats ! Seek ’em out, doer!’ and Stump is in an instant careering madly about the road, the shortened tail which gave him his name quivering with excitement, and the clouds of dust he raises causing him almost to choke in his excitement. There was not a sign of one of his traditional enemies to be seen, however, and with a yelp of melancholy significance he announces that his confidence has been basely betrayed, then deaf to the hoarse voice of the charmer, and with his little red tongue hanging somewhat dejectedly out of the corner of his mouth he trots morosely down the road, again pursued by a burst of mocking laughter from the white house with the green shutters, which is sufficient of itself to exasperate the meanest of curs, let alone a dog such as my friend with the brown patch over one eye, who once very nearly got a prize in the dog show. I know that ‘ Stump ’ has been fooled just as well as he does himself, and though I sympathise deeply with him, the more so as I hug myself with the harmless delusion that I am his master, I yet cannot refrain from a thrill of admiration at the cleverness of his fooler,

who, though the thick foliage hides him from my sight, I know to be a gifted but most conscienceless grey parrot who once lived next door to me and who has learned to imitate my voice to perfection. Fond as I have always been of horses and attached as I am to the dogs I now have, and the memories of the many moi-e I have whistled to my side in times past, the keenest intellectual enjoyment ever afforded to mo by any of my pets I have owed to my parrots—-or rather my wife’s parrots, for nominally, at least, they have always been her property—and the little incident I have just described sets me to remembering the many virtues of one in particular, who has, alas ! gone the way that the best of parrots as well as the worst of men, must all travel. The name of this paragon among parrots was Punch, and when he became a member of our household he was, according to the ancient mariner who parted with him for a ‘ consideration/ ‘ not more than six months old, marm, s’ he’p me.’ I think the ancient mariner must accidentally have told the truth, for only a baby parrot could have been so absolutely fx'ee from guile as was this fellow. He didn’t know how to do anything but scream and eat, and he divided his time with impartiality between these two functions. We had had parrots before, but had always come into possession of them after they had been at all events partially educated, and so for a time we were at a loss what to do with this shrieking demon, who did nothing all day but stand upon his head and yell defiantly at all vvho approached the brand-new cage in which he was confined, or more still, snap at the hand which offered him some dainty. The method of treatmeut which his mistress adopted was so successful in its results that I am inclined to believe a recital thereof may be of benefit to those who may find themselves with a squawking bird upon their hands, together with an apparently hopeless desire to convert it into a good talker. After the young bird has become accustomed to his new surroundings the work of education must begin, but at the outset it must be borne in mind,to one person alone the task must be assigned. A parrot is not like a dog, who easily becomes attached to more than one person and is on friendly terms with the whole family. The bird will acknowledge the supremacy of one individual alone and shows affection to no one else. In the case of Punch my wife was the being so singled out, and to her is due the credit of developing what afterwards turned out to be his really phenomenal conversational powers. She began by teaching him that she was his mistress. Whenever he made, a vicious snap at her she would quickly but firmly but not roughly slap him on the head or side so as to knock him nearly off' his perch. Sometimes she would use a light switch or cane and rap him smartly on the feet or wings when he displayed his vicious propensities. On the other hand she allowed no one else to feed him, and her hand only brought to him the dainties he loved. Gradually he learned his lesson, and soon an upward movement of the finger was all that was requisite to check the angry snap of those vise-like jaws. Then came the task of teaching him to talk. It is a common idea that the only way a parrot learns to mimic is by picking up the random conversation that goes on about him. This is a mistake. He must be put on the track by constant and patient endeavour, and the words one wants him to learn must bo forced upon him, as it were, in a quick, sharp, almost angry tone of voice so as to partly scare him into their repetition. Thus the frequent adjuration to ‘Stop that noise, sir—or I’ll whip you ’ which was hurled at Punch soon attracted his attention, and the first intelligible word he croaked out was ‘ Stop that ! Stop that!’ He quickly learned the remainder of the sentence, and from that time forth picked up new words and phrases almost daily. Before he was two years old Punch had a vocabulary of at least three hundred words and phrases, could sing a few lines of more than one song, and could imitate to perfection the clucking of the hens, the barking of the dogs, the mewing of the cat, besides being able to whistle almost as well as the accomplished Mrs Shaw. The most curious feature about the mimicry of a really clever parrot is perhaps the almost startling l’eievancy with which he delivers sentences or exclamations which of course him must be absolutely meaningless. There is a well authenticate! anecdote, for instance, of a parrot show which was held in the North of England some years ago. A prize was offered for the best andcleverest talker, and about one hundred birds were entered. After all had been brought out by their owners, and coaxed bo utter sentences of greater or less cleverness, the cover was taken off the cage of the last bird, an African grey. He solemnly cocked his grey head on one side, eyed the assembled competitors gravely, and then croaked out reflectively, ‘My ! my ! what a lot of parrots, to be sure !’ He gob the prize. Punch could hold his own in this respect, and I believe he must have known sometimes the meaning of the words be so aptly uttered. His cage was hanging in the window of my library one afternoon, while I was writing, when two workmen came in to finish some little job or another they were at work upon about the fireplace. One of them was a crabbed old man of whom his young assistant seemed bo stand somewhat in awe. Punch stared at them with owllike persistency, apparently bent on discovering how the American workingman manages to do as little work as possible in a working hour. He was perfectly silent, however, and the men were not cognisant of his presence. Suddenly the elder man dropped his chisel through the hole he was cutting in the chimney flue, and it fell down and lodged where it was well nigh impossible to reach it. Its clatter had hardly died away when the old workman, vvho was vigorously swearing at his luck, heard, as ho thought, his companion contemptuously ejaculate, ‘ Shut up ! you old fool !’ He turned on him in a trice, and indignantly asked him what he meant by calling him a fool. ‘ I didn’t/ said the young man. ‘ You lie ! You did !’ retorted the other, and in a few minutes the two men were in the midst of a wordy battle, which was in danger of becoming something more serious, when I interfered and ‘ gave away ’ the real culprit. I had hard work to persuade the old man that the insolence really came from the parrot, and I don’t think that he was properly convinced after all.

Another instance of the appositeness of the bird’s remarks occurs to me. I was at one time fn the habit of coming home from my journalistic duties at so late an hour that all the family had always retired. A little supper wculd be laid out for me in the dining-room and here I would repair. Punch’s cage was always placed on the dining-room table, and when I came in he was invariably asleep. The turning up of the gas would awaken him, however, and slowly opening one eye he remarked with never a variation, though the same thing happened night after night for nearly two years, ‘ Hallo ! Horace. Late again, you bad boy, you! Late again !’ A combination of three distinct .phrases which I am sure had never been taught to him or even casually heard by him in that precise sequence. On the other hand he never failed to greet my wife in the morning in tho same fashion", ‘ Good morning, Ella ! Come and kisß me ! Come and kiss me !’

Then if no notice were taken, in a distinctly angry tone he would add, ‘ Come and kiss me, I say ! Will you ? Will you ?’ If the caress were given he would rapidly imitate the sound of a kiss, ana after keeping - that up for a minute or so he would wind up the matutinal exercises by gravely croaking, ‘ That’s enough, now ! No time to waste. That’s enough!’ If, however, he were ignored, he would lapse into sulky silence and no amount of coaxing would draw even a single kissing sound from him. He was not a profane bird, but he had one expression which I may write as ‘ dam phool,’ which only thorough exasperation could draw from him. If, for instance, a stranger addresed him as ‘Tolly,’ a term he hated, or asked him to ‘ have a cracker, a form of substance he loathed, he would glare fora moment and croak out, ‘You damphool, you !’ and promptly shutting his eyes pretend to go to sleep. I have watched him do this scores of times, and lie never varied the performance by a motion of the shade of an expression. His imitations as I may call them were always just as aptly employed. Ho never called ‘ Trim ! Trim ! Come here, sir ! Come here at once !’ to the setter save when the setter was in sight, while only when he saw the little bull-terrier scampering about did he whistle shrilly and call quickly that particular dog’s name, ‘ Grip, Grip, Grip I say !’ So with the hens. He never clucked when these imbecile bipeds were safely housed in their wire-guarded run, but when they had broken out he delighted to lure them up to the part of the gax-den near which his cage hung, and where they could do greater damage than elsewhere. So with his laughter, of which he had many varieties. YVhea he heard a dish broken he invariably broke into a pe i of scornful cachination extremely annoying to the clumsy one,while when he had simply fooled one of the dogs his laugh was a goodhumoured roar with only a tinge of derision about it. As a bird of intellect he was, of course, cognisant of his own importance, and knew it was his learning alone that had increased his value from the sls and a glass of old Medford rum, which had been the consideration for which he passed into our hands, to the S3OO which Mme. Adelina Patti, who is a collector of parrots, once offered for him when she was told by mutual friends of his manifold perfections. This being the case, he was jealous of his dignity and hated to see his mistress fondle anyone else or any other animal in his presence. I have always been of the opinion that he broke his heart through jealousy. We moved to the country when Punch was about three three years old, and a recent acquisition in the shape of a magnificent English setter dog occupied much of his mistress' time. At this Punch rebelled. Fiist he began by trying to get even by torturing his rival to death. He would whistle to him and bring him from the other end of the garden fifty times a day ; he would tell him to ‘ charge ’ and scold him as ‘a bad, bad dog’ until the poor beast nearly lost his reason. But all this was to no purpose. Punch saw himself deserted for his hated rival and began to mope. The sordid spirits around him misunderstood the signs, and with materialistic ignorance attributed them to cold or influenza. For this disease he was treated, but what relief can castor oil or heated flannels or even fine Cognac bring to a broken heart? Punch pined away befare our very eyes. One day from his perch in the dining-room he mournfully called to his mistress, who was ascending the staircase, ‘ Ella ! Ella !’ It was the first words he had spoken for ten days, and full of delight at the supposed recovery of the patient, she ran down and took him in her arms. He feebly tried to climb upon her shoulder, and bury his head in her hair as was his wont, but his strength was not equal to the task. He wagged his head to and fro and then crooned out: ‘ Poor Punch ! Poor little Punchy !’ in self commiseration. Then he lifted up his beak, faltered feebly. ‘ Kiss me ! kiss poor Punchy ! good night !’ and died. And this is the true and faithful account of the death of the cleverest parrot that ever lived. Horace Townsend.