newzandar | A group of five newly acquired parrots at Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in the UK are being booted from the zoo after squawking obscenities at visitors.
After being quarantined together for several days last month due to the coronavirus outbreak, the bold birds had apparently taught each other a colorful vocabulary of curse words.
Lincolnshire Wildlife Park chief executive Steve Nichols said the five feathered friends were brought to their nonprofit safari, which also serves as a parrot sanctuary to 1,500 recovering birds, on August 15.
He told Lincolnshire Live that “because they were all quarantined together, it meant that one room was just full of swearing birds.”
“The more they swear, the more you usually laugh, which then triggers them to swear again,” he explained, adding that they had also learned to mimic human laughter as a Pavlovian response to the swearing.
“So when one swears, one laughs, and before you know it, it just got to be like an old working men’s club scenario where they are all just swearing and laughing,” said Nichols.
Hoping the phenomenon was temporary, zookeepers allowed the parrot posse to be displayed after pandemic restrictions were lifted and the wildlife park reopened.
“Literally within 20 minutes of being in the introductory, we were told that they had sworn at a customer, and for the next group of people, all sorts of obscenities came out,” Nichols said.
Customers were reportedly amused by the bizarre spectacle, but park managers decided the potty-mouthed parrots needed to be retrained lest they offend impressionable children.
They have since been sent to an “off-shore enclosure” surrounded by other wild parrots, which zoo handlers hope might influence their boisterous birds to enjoy more appropriate chatter.
Eventually, the cheeky flock will be reintroduced in different regions of the park. That way, if any continue their profane ways, “it [won’t be] as bad as three or four of them all blasting it out at once,” said Nichols.
The parrots of Lincolnshire may be growing accustomed to the publicity. Just last month, a 9-year-old yellow-crowned Amazon named Chico made headlines after his rendition of Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy,” with near-perfect vibrato, was caught on camera by a zoo-goer. The footage shared on Facebook pulled in more than 100,000 viewers in a week.
The park claimed the songbird is indeed a fan of pop music, having also memorized verses of Lady Gaga’s seminal single “Poker Face,” Gnarls Barkley’s hit debut “Crazy” and Katy Perry’s banger “Firework.”