When a feathered friend appears in your home, you may want to know everything about it. When you start to learn a lot of information about its care, keeping and feeding, then willy-nilly you get tired. To take your mind off, read interesting facts about the parrots.
Parrots as a kind of birds appeared on the planet a very long time ago. Their progenitors were quite different from the pets we use to live with. Something has been lost for millions of years of evolution, but much has been acquired. The ability of parrots to speak is amazing. If even a parrot can speak English, so every human must improve it using, for instance, preply.com. Some facts about parrots, which we are used to seeing almost daily, can surprise anyone.
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1. In fact, there are more than 350 species of parrots. However, more than one-third of them are on the verge of extinction in the wild nature. 30% of endangered species is a huge figure. Very often, men are guilty of that. The bird catchers, who illegally carry birds, keep them in disgusting conditions. Many parrots die during transportation. In addition, many birds are not able to breed in captivity.
2. Not only humans give their children names. Parrots also give their chicks names. Of course, you will not hear this right away but if you prick up your ears, then the change in intonation and the chirp can be eventually caught. The parrot chick knows the sound of its name and reacts. A surprising fact is that parrots have a sense of rhythm. They do not just move thoughtlessly to the music. If you change the song, the tempo of the birds’ movements will also change. A death metal band, Hatebeak, has a parrot as the main vocalist. Its name is Waldo and the band has already recorded three albums.
Do you know that parrots have no vocal cords? These birds perform all the repetitions only with the help of their tongues and the beaks. Besides teasing a person, a parrot is able to simulate the sound of a household appliance, such a blender or a drill. Maybe it is better to keep a parrot away from such devices?
3. In Australia, there are special schools for parrots to teach them to talk. Not all have enough of patience and time to train their pets, so this is an opportunity to appeal to professionals who make to speak even the most modest and silent bird. In Australia, people noticed very amazing scenes when drunken parrots suddenly fall in bundles down from the sky. The parrots in the wild eat a plant that causes a kind of fever, similar to alcoholic intoxication. They cannot fly anymore, that’s why they fall down. At first, the inhabitants were in the panic and thought that someone was deliberately poisoning the parrots.
4. Parrots live in flocks in the wild nature. Sometimes, the number of birds in one flock is frightening. Scientists found such a population of parrots, in which there were more than 70 000 birds! For the sake of eating, parrots can fly over 750 kilometers per day and they find the way back without any mistake.
Parrots find a couple for life. It is interesting that even after the breeding season, the female and male remain with each other. They help each other in finding food, take care of chicks, and sleep at the same time.
5. The biggest parrots live in the Amazonian region. The height of those birds can be about one meter. To make it easier to imagine what giants these are, look at a three-year-old child. The smallest parrot in the world has only 9 cm. It’s less than 2 matchboxes and its weight is only 12 g. Such parrots were found in Papua New Guinea. In the wild nature of this region, even insects are larger. Who is hunting whom out there?
The largest parrot’s beak in the world is 10 centimeters in length. It belongs to the black cockatoo. This cockatoo can easily break many solid objects with its beak, like by nippers. Those cockatoo’s beak could fit the Amazonian parrot as a space for living.
6. The legs of the parrot also deserve special attention. They are short, but extremely strong, with the fingers, located absolutely in an incredible way. Two middle fingers look forward and two extreme ones look back. Such a system of fingers allows the parrots to use their legs just the way we are using our hands. That is why they can take and move various objects, bring them to the beak, keep food in their legs, etc.
Do you know that parrots can also be right-legged or left-legged? Keep an eye on your pet. What leg does he use to take a treat? All in all, parrots are the only birds able to eat, keeping food in their legs.
7. Finally, it is worth to say that some species of parrots can live up to 80 years. The longest-lived parrots are the macaw. Then, we can see one picture with both eyes. This kind of vision is called binocular. Parrots are different. Each parrot’s eye can see its own picture, so parrots have double monocular vision. In addition, a human can distinguish up to 16 images per second, while a parrot can notice about 150 of different pictures!
