Parrot Culture
Parrot Gulture
Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird
Bruce Thomas Boehrer
University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia
Copyright © 2004 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
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Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Boehrer, Bruce Thomas
Parrot culture : our 2,500-year-long fascination with the world’s most talkative bird / Bruce Thomas Boehrer.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-8122-2104-6
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Parrots. I. Title.
SE473.P3 B59 2004
636.6’865—dc22 2004043014
This book is dedicated to the birds I love, to Jerry Singerman, who gave me permission to write about them, and to Linda Hall, who helped me to find the words
Contents
Prologue: Circa 40 Million B.C.
Chapter 1: Invasion of the Parrots
Chapter 2: Mysteries and Marvels
Chapter 3: Return of the Parrots
Chapter 6: Extinction and Beyond
Prologue: Circa 40 Million B.C.
The oldest parrot known to humankind lived in the south of England. Or, to be more precise, it lived in what we now call the south of England. When this particular bird flourished—some 40 million years ago, in the middle Eocene epoch—there was no one around to call the place anything.
There was no one around to call the bird anything, either. But people being what they are, we’ve made up for that failure by naming it after the fact. We call it Palaeopsittacus georgei (Juniper and Parr 15), a typically intimidating scientific name that, when translated, yields a typically banal meaning: “George’s Very Old Parrot.” The George in question, a Mr. W. George, who is credited with discovering the bird (Harrison 205), is not the first man to use a parrot as vehicle for his name and reputation.
We found out about this bird as one usually finds out about prehistoric creatures: through fossils, in this case “11 associated and incomplete bones” including, most important, some pieces of the bird’s foot. George’s Very Old Parrot was “about the size of the Recent Poicephalus senegalus” or Senegal parrot, which is to say about twenty-three centimeters (Harrison 204, 205). Through similar remains, researchers have placed parrots in Germany and Australia roughly 40 million years ago; in France some 26 million years ago; in Africa between 1.5 and 7 million years ago; and in South America some 1.5 million years ago.1
But the European fossils stand as a special irony. Within recorded history, parrots have lived on five of the six continents inhabited by human beings; Europe, their apparent place of origin, is the single exception. It is the people of Europe, however, who have had the most powerful impact on the world’s parrots, and for that reason you could also argue that parrots have made a deeper—or at least a different—impression on the people of Europe and their descendants than on any other segment of the human race.
This is the story of the resulting interaction. It is the story of what these people have meant to the birds, and of what the birds have meant to these people. It’s a story with clear beginnings, but with no certain ending, and with certain, but by no means predictable, consequences for our world.
At heart, it is the story of an ongoing process of acquisition, played out on both the material and intellectual levels. It unfolds through the products of European cultural expression: poetry, drama, fiction, philosophy, painting, sculpture, travelogues, natural history, legal records, joke-books, clothing and textiles, and so forth. As it is a story about the global ascendancy of western culture, and since that culture’s dominant forms have come to be Anglocentric, English-language materials assume special prominence in this book. Nonetheless, the artifacts surveyed here range from ancient Greece and Rome; through England, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain; to North, South, and Central America.
Since first coming to western attention, parrots have served as zoo specimens and objects of research, as emblems of status, as mythic marvels and artistic subject-matter, as pets and pests, as objects of affection and satirical scorn, and as licit and illicit merchandise of great value. In each of these respects, parrot culture participates in the character and development of human culture: how we see ourselves against the natural world, how we make use of that world to enrich our own lives, and how we make sense of our own spiritual, intellectual, and moral condition in the process. Most recently, however, these birds have come to stand both as a challenge to the ways we distinguish culture from nature and as a marker of the price we have paid for this act of distinction. In this sense, Parrot Culture is about the ties that bind us to a particular, and marvelous, piece of our world, and about how that piece of our world can reveal us to ourselves.
Most broadly, parrot culture reveals both our fascination with and our intolerance for the exotic. Western civilization’s engagement with parrots, as reflected in 2,500 years of art, literature, and historical evidence, stands as a transcontinental illustration of the adage that familiarity breeds contempt. The very qualities that render these birds sublime from a distance have arguably made them ridiculous at close quarters. Of course this process, like many historical trends, admits of exceptions, and it has developed unevenly. But it has developed nonetheless, with the result that parrots today are more familiar in the home and yet more endangered in the world, more coveted and yet more taken for granted, than ever before. Biologists have catalogued more than 350 species of the bird, with major populations in South and Central America, Australia, Indonesia, India, and West Africa. But a third of these species are now threatened with extinction, and many have already ceased to exist. Less than two centuries ago, parrots inhabited North America in vast numbers. Today the continent’s indigenous parrots are gone. In the meantime, exotic parrot species have been imported to North America from