The saying goes that there are only two undeniable facts of life: death and taxes. Parrot lovers will attest to a third: parrots make noise, and it’s not always pleasant. Even the few species of parrots most known for their reticence can make an owner wish she had bought a fishbowl instead.

As I sit here typing these words into my laptop, Hope, my African grey parrot is doing his best rendition of a New York City fire truck, and Jesse, my Meyer’s parrot, is waging an ear-splitting battle with his banana-shaped wooden toy. Peace? Quiet? I don’t think so. If I had wanted a fire truck I would have gotten a fire truck. But, my birds are my best friends, and I figure that if they can tolerate me, I can certainly tolerate them.

Unfortunately, some bird owners aren’t as charitable—and some birds aren’t as intermittingly noisy as mine. You might have a bird that screams all day for no apparent reason, or one that swears with more verve than a drunken sailor. How do you get that darn bird to shut up? Most avian behaviorists and experts agree that the solution to excessive vocalization is not to get rid of the feathered thing that’s trying to converse with another parrot in Guatemala via the air waves, but by becoming informed about the way parrots learn and communicate.

What’s Normal?

The first step to enjoying a reasonably quiet household is to have a firm understanding of normal parrot vocalization. There’s no such thing as a quiet parrot. Living with a parrot is like living with a roommate—there’s not much you can do if he decides to sing in the shower or talk on the phone for hours—but at some point he’ll rest in front of the television or go to sleep.

“A healthy bird will vocalize,” said Bob and Liz Johnson, directors of The Shyne Foundation, Inc., A Free Flight Natural Habitat Sanctuary in South Florida, and the owners of 135 large, free flying parrots. The Johnsons have seen more than their share of birds given up for adoption because the owners felt they were too loud. “I have seen many cases where a bird, who appeared to be quiet in the pet shop or at the breeder, and was even quiet at first in his new home, was later given up because he became too noisy. Our first hyacinth macaw, a wild-caught fledgling 24 years ago, didn't make a sound for the first year of his life. He has subsequently made up for it!”

Fortunately, a healthy, well-socialized parrot performs its vocalizations in a general cycle, and not unremittingly, all day long. “Normal vocalizations happen early in the morning, around sunrise, and again at sunset,” said Phoebe Greene Linden, psittacine behavior consultant and co-owner of Santa Barbara Bird Farm (www.santabarbarabirdfarm).

“Additionally, my parrots vocalize upon waking from naps, as a greeting when I return from errands, in response to the ring of the telephone, and in anticipation of a warm dinner.”

Though the Johnsons can’t speak for
the average household, they do find that their flock tends to be noisier early in the morning and late in the afternoon. “This is not to say that they are quiet the rest of the day,” said Liz Johnson. “Many are noisy in the habitat out of sheer exuberance. Almost daily, I run outside because one of the cockatoos sounds as if he is being tortured, only to find him swinging vigorously upside-down from a tree branch, screaming as only a cockatoo can.”

If you have a bird that’s vocalizing normally and you still think the racket is too loud, it’s likely that you chose a species known for its vocal superiority, probably a cockatoo, macaw, Amazon parrot, or conure. “I’ve heard it said that in the wild you can hear the large macaws coming from five miles away,” said Liz Wilson, a parrot behavior consultant from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Macaws tuning up with gut wrenching, window rattling noise for five or ten minutes are normal. Birds develop the voices they need in their wild environment. Eagles have a tiny voice because they are solitary birds that don’t need to communicate over long distances. Most parrots are flock animals and have to communicate in dense foliage. Nature has designed a voice to fulfill the bird’s needs in a wild environment, and that means they will use it in a captive environment too.”

A parrot’s voice is one of its many means of survival, and as a prey animal, survival is its prime objective. Without that loud voice, a parrot would be in trouble indeed. “Grey parrots are highly social, highly mobile, and highly vocal animals that live in the rain forest,” said Diana May, a student of Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s, studying the behavior of free-living grey parrots in Central Africa for her dissertation research. “Because they expend a considerable amount of time and energy to calling, we can reasonably assume that vocal behavior is important to survival and reproduction. It makes sense that greys rely on acoustic communication because visibility is usually poor in the forest canopy. A silent grey in the wild would surely not survive.”

If your bird is vocalizing normally, you can be relatively certain that its survival instinct is functioning, an indication of a healthy bird. “Normally loud birds that are suddenly quiet could be in trouble medically,” said Wilson. “I got into avian behavior while working as a vet tech specializing in birds and having the horrible realization that when we cured a bird it could lose its home in six months. It’s a lot easier to live with a parrot that is chronically ill—once they get back the healthy and happy parrot it will start making normal noise. The owners never knew what it was like to live with a healthy parrot.”

They’re Your Ears

To a cockatoo, the sound of its flock screeching riotously is music to its little feather-covered ears. How can one person live happily with a screaming macaw and another go out of her mind listening to a pair of budgies chatter all day? “Problematic vocalization is in the ear of the listener,” said Layne Dicker, avian behavior consultant, from Los Angels, California. “We had a dusky headed conure that we thought was noisy until we got a cockatoo. I know people that think cockatiels are too noisy, and I know people that live in a house with twenty large macaws and don’t hear a thing.”

Understanding something about the basic vocalizations of a species you’re interested in acquiring before you acquire it will help you to maintain a noise level you can live with. Knowing something about your own capacity to handle sound is helpful as well. “People have very differing sensitivity to sounds,” said Wilson. “When I had doves they drove my husband crazy, whereas the intermittent Amazon yells didn’t necessarily both him. It was the doves’ constant noise that bothered him most. I know people that are aggravated by the nonstop chirping of a cockatiel. When we talk about quiet parrots, we are not talking about a quiet animal. We’re talking about a bird that’s quieter than the loud parrots.”

“Humans only notice things that aggravate them,” Wilson continued. “When the parrot screams its owners notice it. When it’s quiet, they forget they have a parrot. Parrots get ignored when they’re ‘good’ and when they are loud they get attention. Owners do the opposite of what they should be doing.”

How Much Is Too Much?

Just because your parrot’s vocalizations annoy you doesn’t mean that the vocalization is excessive. “Problem vocalizations are characterized as loud, repetitive, and devoid of meaning, except to convey unhappiness,” said Linden. “Problem vocalizations are often described as sounding ‘desperate’ and ‘unhappy.’”

“In my work as a psittacine behavior consultant, excessive screaming is one of the most common complaints people have about companion birds,” continued Linden. “Problem screaming indicates limited vocal skills that have been practiced to the point of obliterating other more pleasing sounds. Many times people try to eliminate screaming from a loud bird’s repertoire, but its better to modify screaming into varied and pleasing sounds than it is to try to eliminate vocalizations altogether.”

Liz Wilson concurs that a bird that’s screaming for hours is vocalizing excessively. The bird has somehow been rewarded for the screaming, usually inadvertently, and the owner must then figure out what the reward was and how to stop it. Wilson sees many clients that choose not to address the problem early, with disastrous consequences. “A woman called me about a cockatoo that had been screaming all day for seventeen years,” said Wilson. “She had only contacted me because she was being threatened with eviction and her neighbors weren’t speaking with her any more. People wait until they’ve gotten an ultimatum and a deadline, but it takes time for problems to develop and time to fix them.”

Intermittent Versus Persistent

For most parrot owners who understand that their parrot is bound to make some noise, it is the persistent loud vocalizations that tend to be more exasperating than the intermittent screeching. Sporadic screaming that’s considered normal vocalization should neither be acknowledged nor rewarded—the bird may become used to that kind of attention and learn that screaming is a good way to get you to do its bidding—though all screaming is a means of communication, and conscientious parrot owners make an effort to understand why their bird is screaming and if it has something to do with a problem in the bird’s immediate situation.

“If you leave the room the parrot is liable to make some noise to call you back,” said Dicker. “It perceives being abandoned by the flock or perceives that a member of the flock has ventured into unsafe territory. When a bird is alleged to have a screaming problem, you first have to look at what the bird is telling you. If the water bowl is empty, then it’s appropriate to vocalize. You don’t want to train your bird to be uncommunicative. Birds are vocal for a reason.”

The way you react to persistent screaming directly correlates to what the screaming is intended to communicate. “If a baby bird is screaming and it’s afraid, you have to answer it,” said Wilson. “If it’s an adult and it’s yelling orders, you have to ignore it. You can’t do anything to change excessive vocalizations unless you know what’s going on.”

Compounding The Problem

According to the experts, having two or more birds of the same or similar species will up the volume exponentially. “To the extent that birds recognize similarity and dissimilarity amongst themselves, the closer birds are in species the more they tend to amp each other up,” cautioned Dicker. “If you have a Moluccan cockatoo and a cockatiel, they are less likely to compound each other’s vocalization than two Moluccans, though this is a sweeping generalization.”

Having two bonded birds of dissimilar species creates the same effect. According to Liz Wilson, if you separate birds that like each other it only serves to produce more noise because the birds will call to one another. However, two unbonded birds that live in the same home may not have this same problem, depending on the relationship.

“For years I boarded two parrots for a couple—one was a grey and one was an Amazon,” said Wilson. “Their circumstances changed and they needed to rehome the birds. I was able to find the Amazon a home easily. They couple was concerned about splitting the birds up because they lived together for 18 years. It occurred to me that the birds never called to each other when I took them out of the room. I told the owners that I didn’t think the grey would mind, and that he might even be pleased. I was right. He blossomed when the Amazon left. He was finally out of her shadow.”

For multi-bird homes, the problem of excessive vocalization might be compounded by the birds’ inability to find a calm space. “In multi-bird households, a quiet area—a place where birds can retreat from visual contact with each other—often reduces vocalizations, especially when companion birds differ in personality, species, age, or gender,” offered Linden. “Sometimes, they just want to get out of sight of each other and these alone times are soothing. Many clients report good results when a screaming bird is given a visual barrier from other birds, especially when shy birds are housed in the same room as rambunctious birds.”

Polly Wanna Shut The Heck Up?

Most people that acquire a talking species are delighted when their bird begins mimicking the sounds of the world around it, but some owners aren’t prepared for the bird to talk as much as they do.
“I’m amazed at how many people have complained about talking,” said Wilson. “How do I shut him up? they ask. These are people that want an on and off button. They want some quiet time and their grey is babbling. Those people should have a radio that they can turn on and off, not a bird. I tell them how wonderful it is that their grey is so happy. If I can’t convince them how luck they are that they have such a happy bird, I fear for that relationship. Getting a parrot because you like its talking ability is like getting pregnant because you like baby clothes.”

If you have a species of bird that is known to mimic well, such as a grey, an Amazon, a budgie, or a ringneck, be careful what you teach it, or you might be sorry later. “Birds can take learned sounds and amplify them one hundred percent,” warned Linden. “One client of mine still bemoans the day he taught his sulfur-crested cockatoo to say yabba dabba dooooo.”

But don’t fret if your parrot has taken a not-so-nice word or noise and turned it into a booming roar that the whole neighborhood can hear. “There seems to be a ten-day period before a sound is extinguished when it isn’t rewarded,” said Wilson. “I used to board birds in my home, and a bird boarding might learn the sound of a macaw screaming behind a door at the other end of the house. If the owners don’t reward the sound when they take the parrot home, the sound will go away by itself in about ten days.”

What’s Your Part In The Screaming Party?

Your role in your parrot’s migraine-inducing screaming fest begins with the type of bird you choose. “Without a doubt, cockatoos take the volume prize,” said the Johnsons. “Our cockatoos are outside in our habitat and can often be heard a half mile away. Some amazons and some macaws can run them a close second. Noise seems to be relative, however. A wonderful rainbow lory was placed here because his former owners said he was too noisy. Here, among cockatoos and macaws, his sound is barely audible.”

The volume and “vibe” in your home may also contribute to your parrot’s volume. “I have a customer who has two sun conures and he came to me distressed because his partner couldn’t deal with their noise and he was about to give the birds up for adoption,” said Holly Hemmingway, owner of Parrots and Pups pet shop in the West Village, New York City. “He was at the point of tears because he’d had them for years. I told him to just lower the energy in his house. Just chill out. Over the course of two weeks he came in and he said that everything was better. The birds quieted down.”

“My responsibility as a pet shop owner is to tell customers that birds do scream,” continued Hemingway. “I carry a lot of poicephalus because they are quieter. If you choose a bird with a lower decibel level you will probably not have to end up making a chose between your bird and your apartment, because most of the time the loud bird looses.”

Training Yourself To Train Your Parrot

Timing is everything in telling jokes and parrot training, especially when it comes to excessive, loud vocalization. Even though a scream may seem like a “natural” vocalization, the amount of screaming can triple (or more) if the bird gets a “reward” for its behavior. “Learned vocalizations are always a function of positive reinforcement,” said Dicker. “The parrot learned it, you laughed at it, and so the parrot is going to keep doing it. It got a reaction. Frequently the learning and the reacting are the same—for example, swear words, because owners usually say them while they are excited. Parrots love energy.”

Hemingway concurs. “People are so quick to react to the screaming and that’s what the bird wants—a big drama. A negative reaction to a bird is as great as a positive one,” she said. “You can’t let the bird think he’s King Kong and has got everyone watching him on the Empire State Building.”

Praise for the right behaviors is far better than making a big scene for the wrong ones. Train yourself to disregard the unwanted vocalization and to begin replacing it with a wanted vocalization. According to Dicker, traditional “reprogramming” methods included simply ignoring the bird when it performs an unwanted behavior, but he suggests that it’s not enough. “Ignoring something is doing nothing, and the parrot can’t associate nothing with something,” said Dicker. “You have to give the parrot a behavior to replace the screaming with in order to obtain the same thing that it received from screaming. The thing I always recommend is to ignore the screaming and when the parrot is quiet for a short period of time, praise it for that, then raise the bar a little bit. Praise for two minutes of quiet, then three minutes, and so on.”

“Screaming is first, and foremost, a form of communication,” continued Dicker. “The bird is telling you something. Screaming always starts from a natural cause. The thing to do is figure out what the screaming means. When you deal with the reason for screaming, the bird should stop that type of screaming, but only if you deal with it quickly, before it habituates. Address the behavior while it is still in the communication phase and not in the parrot’s every day existence. Once it is, you have to figure out what the parrot is telling you and then you have to deprogram.”

Giving the bird things to do will help immensely with screaming. Bored birds are more likely to express their boredom vocally. “Some screaming birds seem to have the vocal segment of their brains stuck on wide open glut. All they do is scream,” said Linden. “These birds need to have their physical environments and schedules enriched to include lots of opportunities for athletic exploration, visual stimulation and general learning. Caregivers can help screaming birds blunt their obnoxious noises through the provision of adequate diets, lots of exercise, an abundance of busy work, and meaningful communication.”

If all else fails, a little diplomacy might help the neighbors to see that you—and your parrot—aren’t so bad after all. “When I moved into an apartment with my blue and gold, Sam, I introduced her, on hand, to all of the new neighbors and told them that if they heard a noise like a child being dismembered, this was the animal that was making the noise,” said Wilson. “I gave them all my phone number and told them to call me if Sam annoyed them. They never called.”