Greys also learn to imitate the sounds around them, sometimes to the annoyance of members of the house­hold who cannot distinguish between the ring of the telephone and the Grey's imitation. A bird in my pos­session would imitate to perfection the radio time signals and the squeaking of the door of a cooker. Many Greys are adept at whistling tunes, for whistling is part of their natural range of calls.

The Duke of Bedford (1930) re­corded an instance of mimicry of sound and action. His aviaries were being dismantled for removal, involv­ing `much hammering on wood, wire and corrugated iron constantly going on, as the carpenters engage in their work'. He was surprised to hear, issu­ing from the aviary containing his Grey Parrots:

... the typical sounds of carpentering proceeding therefrom, though no human agent was in view. Looking inside I saw the Parrot with her head bent right over, giving her perch five or six hard taps with the culmen of her beak, then turn­ing to one side and repeating the action on the wire and iron to produce the necessary variation in sound. The time and rhythm were perfect in each case!

Greys are among the most perceptive and intelligent of birds but many are also rather sensitive and highly strung and a relatively small proportion become very tame. However, this is in many cases the fault of the owner as much depends on his or her patience and the amount of time devoted to the bird, as well as its age on acquisition. Nevertheless, there can never have been so many cherished pets among parrots as Greys. They can be the most delightful companions imaginable and their intelligence is a constant source of wonder.

No one should consider keeping one of these birds unless he or she is able to devote much time to it every day. This, of course, applies to all tame parrots but a bored or neglected Grey will soon resort to feather plucking  which is extremely difficult or impossible to cure. Under the same circumstances, Amazon Parrots, for example, rarely remove their feathers. The vast major­ity of parrots which remove their feathers are Greys, macaws and cocka­toos and I feel it is significant that this problem occurs most frequently in the most intelligent species.

The aviculturist with several birds has a fair chance of eventually being able to supply the pet market with a useful number of birds annually. The record produced by one pair of Greys must surely be that held by the late Mrs Velma Hart of Long Beach, Cali­fornia, a renowned breeder of parrots. Her pair produced 87 chicks between 1962 and 1974. This number was, of course, achieved by removing the young for hand-rearing, thus inducing the female to lay again.