Whiskers' words of wisdom!

When I was a kid of 7 or 8, we had a green parakeet named 'Peter'. He was an okay bird famous only for squawking when the evening news came on. My father would then begin squawking about how he couldn't hear the news, the bird's fabric cage cover was then put on...thus beginning nighttime for Peter. I also remember that Peter laid an egg. ???? We thought Peter was a male, AND since this bird never came into contact with another bird, we were kind of surprised! I don't remember the circumstances of his passing, but he did indeed do that at some point.

My family moved when I was 13, and another green parakeet became the family pet. This was 'Whiskers' and he proved to be quite the star. He was both friendly and pretty darned smart! I had read that you could teach a parakeet to talk by repeating a phrase often, and by kicking your voice up to a higher pitch..otherwise when repeated by the parakeet, it would just sound like mumbling and the phrase would be unrecognizable. And so I began with 'Good Morning!' every day and repeated it four or five times during the day for a month or so. And one morning when we were eating breakfast ...you guessed it... from the corner of the kitchen and as clear as a bell...came the parrakeeted "Good Morning" with the exact same inflection of my repetitive prompt. Wahoo!

Since my father's opinion of Whiskers was that he was just an ordinary 'dirty bird' , I thought we could possibly win him over if Whiskers greeted him personally. I began to go over to the cage and say,

"Good morning! And added on...Hel-lo Joe!"

Tacked on to the familiar phrase was the NEW phrase. And I repeated it several times during the day as I had for Whisker's first spoken words.

Yep! Yep! Whiskers was a genius!! Again, he perfected it!

Again I added a new phrase to the two that Whiskers already had mastered, and then he said,

Good morning!

Hello Joe!

Hello Tom! [my brother]

Hello Mare!

You're such a pretty bird!

Parlez-vous Francais? [I took French in high school.]

Buddha make... a miracle! [from The King and I ... our HS musical.]

I could call my friends, put Whiskers on the phone's receiver, and start off the entire litany of 15-20 phrases by prompting the first words of, "Good Morning" and he would say everything he had learned all into the phone.

Whiskers was a 'one of a kind'. A star!!

And a pretty good role model to those kids in school who said that they just couldn't recall those times tables!!