Steve Nichols admits his wildlife park's new plan to stop its more foul-mouthed parrots from swearing could end up backfiring.
Previously, the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in eastern England kept its parrots with penchants for profanity away from the public.
Now, it has decided to move its eight expletive-laden African grays into a new public-facing enclosure alongside 92 far more polite parrots. The hope is the family-friendly birds will rub off on their crude counterparts, and not the other way around.
"The idea was let's go down the risk channel. Let's get them out and see how it goes," Nichols, the park's chief executive, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "Whether we're going to become an adult sanctuary or not, I have no idea."
Parrot snitches on its owner
Nichols says it's not uncommon to come across parrots who swear. After all, he says, they learn it from their owners.
But in 2020, the park's parrot sanctuary ended up taking in an unusually high volume of vulgar birds — five African gray parrots in five days, all surrendered by owners who dropped them off with a warning about their colourful language.
One apologetic woman tried to blame her husband for teaching the parrot to curse, he said. But African grays, he says, don't just mimic words — they also match the precise pitch.
"So they don't only say the word. They say it in your voice. And while we were doing the paperwork, the parrot just happened to swear, and it swore in the lady's voice," he said. "She went quite red when she heard it and realized that she'd been caught."
New arrivals always spend 45 days in a quarantined space before joining the other parrots, Nichols said. And the birds, it turned out, were bad influences on each other.
"I was working in the office next door to their quarantine station, and I could hear the language and I genuinely thought it was some of our volunteers for the charity. And I thought, I best go ahead and tell them to calm it down a bit." Nichols said.
"When I walked in, I was actually quite shocked to find that there was no people, that it was just parrots in there."
Nichols declined to repeat the birds' bawdy language on the radio, but said one of their favourite phrases "begins with F and ends in F."
When the park staff first introduced the birds to public, they swore like sailors at visitors — including small children, Nichols said.
"Our knee-jerk reaction was, oh, we're going to cause ourselves some trouble here."
Sheila, take a bow
So the swearers were separated, placed in the aviary's introduction area — a smaller space inside the main enclosure, where they could still socialize with the other parrots, but were away from the public.
The hope was that with no people to laugh at their foul language — or parrot it back to them — they would drop the cusses.
"And it worked to a point," he said, noting they still occasionally drop some verbal bombs.
But this year, the sanctuary received three new parrots — and they're even worse than the original five.
"We couldn't believe it," he said.
Nichols says there are three categories of swear words. First, you have light cusses that even kids might sometimes say. Then there are medium-level curse words that most adults use regularly.
"But then we've got the next level, which is ... what we classify as rude swear words — words that you don't really find pleasant in most situations. And it's usually the very strong adult words," he said.
"And, unfortunately, the latest three that came — two of those, especially one called Sheila — really, really goes onto the far end of the scale of what people can hear."
The facility has recently built a new public-facing parrot enclosure, Nichols said. And last Friday, staff moved all eight swearing parrots into it, alongside 92 others. There are signs warning the public that they may hear some strong language.
Already, there's some trouble with the new plan.
"We've heard that people are arriving here to see them swear. And if they don't swear, then the people are swearing to try to encourage them," Nichols said.
But whatever happens, he's not sweating it too much.
"In what appears to be a very serious world at the moment ... a very light-hearted story like this seems to have just grabbed everyone," he said.
"So, one way or another, whatever they've done, it feels like they've created a smile that's been like a Mexican wave all the way from here to Australia and back."
