The species is not supposed to even want meat, but he will steal it when he can.

Oh and my 12yo bourk's parakeet really like chicken and madly love poutine. Its so funny seeing her taking a bite of French fries followed by a bite of cheese.

>His "screen time" is not every day and limited to a few hours.

Are you worried if you give him excessive screen time he won't be able to focus on his studies or something? ;-)

(Cute story, thanks for sharing.)

I have a double yellow headed Amazon. He doesn’t seem too interested in other birds (not very interested in my sister’s dove or the wild parrots that fly over head). I’ve put on Blue Planet or YouTubes videos before and he likes to listen to the bird songs/talk, but seems more interested in the sound than the video.

My parrot is interested in my dog though and has picked up of few of my dog’s training commands. He started to say the release command for when my dog sits for his meals so now I get my parrot to use the command on cue, and get the bird to release the dog (and the dog gets dinner and he gets a treat).

If I’m giving attention to my dog, he sometimes wants to come and sit with us on the couch and get some pets himself. He also used to like to drop food for my older dog (who passed), but my younger dog isn’t a huge fan of vegetables so the bird stopped doing it. If my dog seems like he wants to go out the bird will say “you wanna go out?”But most of the time they kind of just ignore each other.

His language is very situational. When I uncover his cage in the morning, he says good morning, when I leave for work or to go out, he says goodbye. He makes water pouring sounds when I pour water, and call himself a good bird when he knows he’s done something good, or say ‘mmmm’ when I’ve given something he likes. He’ll say “wanna go out” when he wants out of his cage. He’s not overly loud for a parrot but does like to belt out some opera regularly.

He learned most of his phrases/words within his first 2-4 years, but I’ve had him for 6 now and he’ll add a new word/phrase into his vocabulary from time to time.

My bird also loves high protein and fatty foods (nuts and coconuts). I’ve never really allowed him to eat my food, but more recently he’s become interested in any food that I’m eating that he knows he’s allowed to have (nuts or popcorn etc), and will say “hello” over and over until I’ve gotten him his unsalted versions of them. I make him do tricks for them usually and that keeps him pretty polite about it. He’s a pretty big bird at 17”.

He used to be a lot more adventurous about food, but he knows what he likes now and usually sticks to his favorites. He also likes to dip each of his kibbles into his water before eating them.

I’ve never expected to get a parrot, but he sort of dropped in my lap and I rescued him. These parrots live as long as humans, so it’s quite the commitment. But he’s a very smart and sweet boi and he’s managed to charm his way into my life.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow-headed_amazon

Nice, he is developing big brain

A bit offtopic, but it's funny how people call parrots/birds "extremely intelligent" and AI/LLMs "just stochastic parrots devoid of any intelligence", even though their capabilities are very obviously far more like the inverse of those qualifications (show me a video where someone has even a basic extended back and forth conversation with a bird).

There is a pretty clear double standard there.

Looking at the numbers: Grey parrots have almost 1 billion 'forebrain' neurons ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n... ). Estimates for the average number of synapses per neuron range in the thousands, so a conservative estimate for the total would be 1 trillion synapses.

If you assume that LLM parameters are comparable to synapses, then such a bird brain is similar to the frontier LLMs in size ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_large_language_models ). Yes, the bird brain is far more energy efficient, but with regard to intelligence modern AI absolutely smokes birds.

> How so or why so, considering their brain size relative to their body, is not well understood.

One factor is neuron size. Bird neurons are around 0.4 the length of mammalian neurons, so you can pack in around 8 times the neurons in a given volume.

A large parrot has the same number of neurons as a medium sized dog.

That was great, thank you for sharing.

I have great respect for anyone who does this type of work.

Far too many people acquire animals that they aren't able or willing to take proper care of, and parrots have very long lives.

...and that might even yield a better product for humans :)

In the past I had parakeets and lovebirds. I think the app is great, but my first (joking) reaction was "Now let's setup a control group by putting the tablet in selfie-mode to simulate a mirror".

> for other parrot owners [...] not be wise to [...] Zoom [...] handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior—at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls. [...] offer an appropriate level of support to empower their parrots but also help them avoid any negative experiences

So to scale, hmm. Visual sentiment analysis of parrots. Parrot-accessibility. And... some kind of chaperone role... Is there a name for UX design which prioritizes non-negativity of experience over task completion and not leaving? Note that parrot-centered design may have unfamiliar properties, like say, stronger association with the physical location of the device, which say might then require a second device elsewhere to emulate a hypothetical "I'm avoiding you and going away to hang with friends" flock UX.

"Is this really a bird I'm communicating with or is it just a statistical parrot?"

“I’m here!”

“I’m over here!”

OnlyFan[tail pigeon]s.

Parrots communicate in a realm of which we can suppose that the possibility for the expression of gratuitous stupidity is limited.

--

There remains the visceral - which instead is a potential part of that realm:

> The study involved experienced parrot handlers who had the time and energy to keep tabs on their birds’ behavior - at the first sign of fear, aggression, disinterest or discomfort, they ended the calls

Solution learnt: building a social network where interactions are interpolated by an assistant.

I wish this concept would develop a little more nuance, there's a lot of good that happens via social media and we can maybe separate that from the somewhat perverse incentives social media companies foist upon people to become valuable.