Pirate Parrot

They'll make you squawwwwwk the plank!

"He's a mute, sir. Poor devil had his tongue cut out, so he trained the parrot to talk for him...no one's yet figured how."

— Joshamee Gibbs, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

Diabolical Masterminds have the Right-Hand Cat. Pirate Captains have the Pirate Parrot. Expect these colorful feathered companions to be chatty and demand crackers. Pirate Parrots usually ride on the shoulder of their pirate owner.

The parrot may or may not:

• Be named "Polly".
• Ask for crackers, "Polly wants a cracker, Polly wants a cracker".
• Say something about "pieces of eight" (a Spanish dollar or piastre — a large silver coin worth eight reals).

In Real Life, it is not known if many pirates actually kept parrots for pets. Parrots are high-maintenance animals that serve no benefit on a ship (unlike, for example, cats, which keep the vermin population down). However, there are records of the occasional (non-pirate) Caribbean sailor keeping parrots and even monkeys as pets, so it's not too unlikely. The whole concept of a pirate and his parrot companion likely started with Treasure Island. And parrots in Real Life do naturally prefer to stand on a person's shoulder. It's also worth noting that at a certain point of time pet parrots commanded huge prices in Europe, so it is not inconceivable for a sailor wanting to settle down to trade in several parrots as a retirement benefit of sorts (parrots do tend to have large lifespans, sometimes surpassing even humans), probably leaving one to himself — which is probably where it all started.

Sometimes, the parrots are pirates themselves, much in the same vein as other Animal Occupation Stereotypes such as construction worker beavers, miner moles and gophers, boxer kangaroos, firefighter Dalmatians, martial artist pandas, and sailor ducks, gulls, otters, crabs, penguins, seals, and polar bears.

Expect some amount of Misplaced Wildlife. Cockatoos, for example, come from Australia and Indonesia, and would be far less likely on the shoulder^note You may now think about the digestive tract of the parrot... of a Caribbean pirate than a macaw or amazon parrot of Central and South America. Then again, most animated parrots are some strange conglomeration of psittacine characteristics rather than realistic: macaw-shaped and colored, Amazon-sized, with a cockatoo crest. In a Space Pirate setting, expect the "parrot" to be an alien or a robot. For Sky Pirates, it could be either a normal parrot or a steampunk-styled Clockwork Creature.

Related tropes include Dressed to Plunder, Parrot Pet Position, and Feather Boa Constrictor. In a setting with anthropomorphic animals, the pirates can be anthropomorphic parrots themselves, though wouldn't count as a Semiaquatic Species Sailor. See All Witches Have Cats for another animal in a similar position to another popular figure in fictional stories.

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Examples:

Advertising

• This Geico commercial features a pirate captain's parrot, who begins saying less-than-complimentary things about the crew, which puts the captain in hot water with them.
• An advertisement for a pirate-themed exhibition at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science had a parrot sqwarking away in this trope to a snoozing bloodhound.
  "Get me a cracker or I'll dunk you from the yardarm, lazy seadog!"

Anime & Manga

• Captain Harlock, as a proud Space Pirate, owns not a parrot but a strange alien bird — with black feathers, a long beak and a thread-thin neck — that pretty much cover the same role, up to mimicking human speech and sometimes riding on his shoulder.
• On Cowboy Bebop, Vicious has an exotic bird perched on his right shoulder most of the time. This only heightens his mystique (and overall evil aura). It's a cormorant (a kind of sea bird that has acidic droppings and a nasty temper). This, combined with the fact that he blows it up in one of the final episodes, probably does say something about Vicious. It's inspired by Harlock's bird, noted above.^note Truth in Television: Cormorants are trainable to a certain extent, and some fishermen in Asia use them as pretty much an aquatic equivalent of hunting hawks. Having one would probably be more useful to a pirate than a parrot.
• Doraemon shorts, if they're pirate-themed, tends to have parrots flying around at random. And then there's two of the movies:
  • Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure in the South Seas, the first pirate-themed adventure, have the main villain Cash having a parrot minion who tries to thwart the heroes' escape from Cash's lair in the climax. The gang's new friend, Jack the pirate-boy, managed to silence the parrot by tying it's beak with his scarf.
  • Doraemon: Nobita's Treasure Island, the second pirate-themed adventure in the series, have Flock's Robot Buddy Quiz, a robotic parrot who's a gift created by his father, the dreaded pirate captain Silver — long before Silver's Heel–Face Turn. Said parrot is one hell of a gadfly who couldn't stop trolling and dope slaping Doraemon and gang though.
• Gundam: The manga Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam gives The Captain a robot parrot as part of their fully embracing the "pirate" part of Space Pirate. Said parrot spouts random lines that reference older Gundam works, leading to the theory that it was made from Amuro Ray's Team Pet and Gundam Series Mascot Haro.
• Amazingly, One Piece has, up to yet, averted this, despite being all about pirates. And considering the series' track record, if one ever does show up, it will most likely be the single most awesome parrot ever seen.
  • The closest to this trope thus far is Doma's, one of Whitebeard's New World allies, trained gun-using Monkey.
  • There's also Rob Lucci's pet bird, who speaks entirely for him while he's undercover while Lucci passes himself off as being mute. Lucci isn't a pirate, though he is a criminal after Spandam throws him under the bus, but as a marine assassin he's probably done his share of sailing.
• In the Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea movie, the pirate villain "The Phantom" had a Chatot (parrot Pokémon) on his shoulder.
• In episode 40b of Tamagotchi, everyone is cast as sea creatures and pirates for a story where Lovelin the mermaid wants to become a human (erm, land Tamagotchi, but the idea is basically the same otherwise) to join Mametchi the pirate captain. Mametchi has a parrot played by Telelin on his shoulder.

Comic Books

• Batman foe Cap'n Fear had a robotic parrot that randomly recorded and repeated phrases spoken near it.
• Subverted by Captain Boone of De Cape et de Crocs, who has a shoulder chicken (that he insists never talks because it's lost its voice), leading to some awkwardness when he and his crew see some actual parrots and he doesn't know what they are. Later he gets a parrot-shaped mechanical bird that can repeat messages... which are known as chickens (a very old-fashioned term for a love letter, and later any letter, which the clockwork birds have replaced) by the locals.
• A strip in The Dandy back in the 30s starred a highly intelligent cockatoo who constantly had to drag her idiotic pirates out of trouble. The title was Cocky-Sue the Cockatoo: She's the Brains of the Pirate Crew.
• Deadpool forced Bob to wear a parrot costume and squawk like a parrot during their short stint as pirates.
• In Five Ghosts, there's a brief scene of a sailor discussing his pet parrot. It can't talk, or at least hasn't learned any phrases yet, and he's a little tired of people being so surprised by this. Later another sailor is told by his buddy that he should get a pet parrot, cuz they're good company.
• Jonah Hex: Though not a pirate himself, marauding Bandito El Papagayo ("The Parrot") was so named for his choice of pet.
• Parodied in a José Carioca cover, where José has gone to a costume party dressed as a pirate, but since he is a parrot, he has a small human pirate on his shoulder instead.
• In The Skull of Agarash, a graphic novel set in the Lone Wolf world, Captain Khadro, pirate ruler of the Lakuri Isles, has a small winged reptile looking like a tiny dragon as Pirate Parrot. It is in fact a Liganim, the shapeshifting Familiar of a Nadziran, the Black Wizard currently possessing Khadro.
• In Lullaby, Jim Hawkins gained a parrot (with an absurdly large beak) sometime before his captain booted him from the ship. Its name is "Crew"; he's got a pegleg and an eyepatch, and carries Jim's flag on his back.
• The second issue of the Madballs comic book published by Marvel Comics subsidiary Star Comics had the Madballs go back in time and encounter a pirate named Captain Weirdbeard. Weirdbeard had a parrot lackey named McCaw.
• The Black Terror's heroic identity was, in-universe, inspired by a book on pirates, and he wears a costume modeled after a Jolly Roger flag. The Project Superheroes version of the character has a sidekick called Parrot, who wears a colorful bird costume.
• Matilda in Randomveus has a large pet parrot — that somehow has a mustache.
• Ruthless modern pirate Mojo in the story "How Daphne lost her Mojo (and got it back!)" in the graphic novel Sex Ed 101 by Enrique Villagran, has a parrot who comments on the action.
• Sadly Wonder Woman didn't get a parrot that time she became a Space Pirate revolutionary for several months in Wonder Woman (1987), however the human woman who was abducted and joined the revolution alongside her acquired a slightly feathery looking alien lizard.
• In Y: The Last Man, buxom captain Kilina prefers a female Capuchin monkey to a parrot, because birds are too cliché.

Comic Strips

• In Nodwick, a ninja-pirate captain has a ninja-parrot on his shoulder (holding a shuriken in its beak).

Fan Works

• In This Bites!, Soundbite, the Transponder Snail who ate the Noise-Noise Fruit, is the closest thing possible to this, being a part of the Straw Hat Pirates, as well as a wisecracker who can mimic any sound he hears and usually sits on the Self-Insert's shoulder. This was lampshaded when Cross referred to him as "Polly" while trying to pass him off as a regular Transponder Snail and saying he used ventriloquism.

Films — Animation

• Iago from Disney's Aladdin is worth mentioning, even though his master Jafar is an Evil Sorcerer and not a pirate... Then in Aladdin and the King of Thieves he goes off with Cassim, Aladdin's long-lost father and former leader of a band of thieves who would occasionally use ships.
• My Little Pony: The Movie: Captain Celaeno and her crew are pirates who ARE parrots. Logically, they are specifically Sky Pirates.
• The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists features Polly, who is really the last dodo.
• The Captain in Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure has a pet parrot.
• The villains of Rio, though technically not pirates, actually both own a sulphur-crested cockatoo named Nigel.
• In Tom and Jerry: The Movie there's Captain Kiddie's parrot Squawk, though Kiddie isn't a pirate and Squawk is just a handpuppet (albeit a seemingly sentient one).
• In Treasure Planet, Long John Silver's pet is a small shapeshifting creature called Morph, who could mimic people in more ways than one.
• Taken to a ridiculous degree in the direct-to-video movie Tom and Jerry: Shiver Me Whiskers, where each of the three pirate captains have a parrot that matches their color scheme. The red and blue pirate captains talk only in growls, which their parrots then translate. It's the opposite with the purple pirate, who can speak perfect English, but can't translate his parrot's growling.

Films — Live-Action

• Silent film The Black Pirate makes sure to show a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder as part of the scurvy crew. They also wind up capturing a monkey.
• The following exchange occurs in Down Periscope, during the "walk the plank" sequence, which has a large percentage of the Stingray's crew playing pirate:
  Buckman: Nitro, isn't that one of my chickens? [indicating very dead plucked chicken tied to Nitro's shoulder]
  Nitro Mike: No, it's a, uh, parrot, uhh, from the Caribbean.
  Buckman: Well don't let it fly away, that's supper.
  Nitro Mike: Arr.
• Captain Hook and his crew of pirates finally get one in the 2003 film Peter Pan. (This trope had been averted in previous adaptations.)
• The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy:
  • A mute pirate named Cotton owns a parrot who does the talking for him (no-one's figured out how). It mostly says "parrot" stuff like "Ready the sails!" — "Mostly we figure that means 'yes'." Leading to Captain Sparrow conducting a job interview with the parrot.
    Captain Jack Sparrow: Mr. Cotton's... parrot. Same question.
  • The parrot's repetition leads to a hilarious scene in the second movie:
    Parrot: Don't eat me! Don't eat me!
    Will: I'm not going to eat you...
    Parrot: DON'T EAT ME! DON'T EAT ME!
    [cue cannibals]
  • Captain Barbossa himself has a pet monkey named Jack.
• Revenge of the Pink Panther: Inspector Clouseau appears disguised as a sailor, with an inflatable parrot on his shoulder.

Gamebooks

• In book 4 of the GrailQuest series, Voyage of Terror, while lost in Mythological Ancient Greece, you can meet with Long John Silver — or at least a pirate pretending to be him. He naturally has a parrot on his shoulder. However, if you decide to fight him, you'll find out that the parrot is a rare breed that's indeed one of the toughest monsters of the book.
• Fighting Fantasy:
  • The titular pirate villain of Bloodbones has a pet parrot named Jezebel as his sidekick; in the final battle as you duel against Captain Bloodbones, Jezebel will actively assist her owner by ambushing you and trying to claw your eyes out (causing some unavoidable damage to your STAMINA and reducing your Attack Strength each round).
  • Master of Chaos begins with you as a galley-slave on a pirate ship, and the captain's parrot will try annoying you repeatedly while you're toiling away at the oars. In a surprising example of Gamebook Cruelty Potential, you're given an option to squash said parrot with your bare hands... and suffer no penalty for your actions.

Literature

• Though pirates are not featured anywhere in the stories, Harold of Bunnicula reads about pirates and wonders whether a "parrot" is an umbrella or a female pirate. Chester puts him straight.
• Parodied in the Discworld novel Going Postal with the Reacher Gilt's pirate costume ("That was a Look, wasn't it?") including a parrot (well, a cockatoo) that says "twelve and a half percent" (i.e. 1/8).
• In Fergus Crane, Captain Smollet keeps a parrot called Bolivia, who is a Token Good Teammate and gets adopted by Fergus after the pirates' defeat.
• In Fortunately, the Milk, the Queen of the Pirates has a parrot.
• Comic inversion: In the sequence that gave stand-up comedian Mike Hardin's book The Fourteen and a Half Pound Budgie its title, Hardin describes a parakeet that he's supposed to pet-sit as being "so nasty it had a pirate on its shoulder."
• Although the Free Traders of Andre Norton's Solar Queen series are not pirates — more of unorthodox merchants — still their captain owns a small alien animal which looks like half-parrot-half-toad. That in addition to more conventional ship-cat.
• The Spellsinger novels have talking animals. In Day of the Dissonance there's a pirate who is a parrot. In Time of the Transference, that character's brother is introduced. He's a pirate parrot accountant.
• In Swallows and Amazons, Nancy and Peggy's uncle, "Captain Flint", owns a parrot. Nancy and Peggy have often tried to teach it to say "Pieces of eight", and are disappointed that all it will say is "Pretty Polly".
• Older Than Radio: This probably started (as most pirate-related tropes did) with Long John Silver, from Treasure Island, who had a parrot named Captain Flint. Also, Captain Flint's most common phrase is "Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!".
• Inverted in The Voyage of Alice (whose author also did research on actual piracy history and wrote books deconstructing pirate stereotypes). The pirates pointedly hunt down a parrot-like alien species in their Leave No Witnesses plan.
• The pirate Littlejohn in James Thurber's The Wonderful O has a parrot that annoys the book's Big Bad (by using words containing the letter "O"); notable for repeatedly being on the receiving end of the memorable threat, "I'll squck its thrug till all it can whubble is geep!"
• Invoked in one of Timothy Zahn's stories, but not with an animal: Marines in Powered Armor wore shoulder-mounted weapons, apparently slaved to aim wherever the wearer's eyes focused, known as "parrot guns".

Live-Action TV

• The Blackadder episode "Potato" guest-stars Tom Baker as Captain Rum. He's not a pirate, but he has a dead parrot lying on his shoulder.
• In the Doctor Who serial "The Pirate Planet" (written by Douglas Adams), the space pirate captain has a robot parrot with a blaster in its beak (the Polyphase Aviatron). It is destroyed off-screen by K9 (who then returns with the bird in its "mouth". Good dog!) According to Douglas Adams, he submitted that script to the Doctor Who production office, and it was rejected. He later wrote in the robot parrot and re-submitted it, and it was accepted.
• Lost in Space episode "The Space Pirate". The title character, named Alonzo P. Tucker, has a robot parrot that sits on his shoulder. Tucker calls it an "esper" (E.S.P., "extra-sensory perception"?). Its eyes glow when it talks and it has psionic powers, such as apportation (teleporting an object from place to place).
• Monty Python's Flying Circus has sketches with pirates and parrots on their shoulders:
  • A soccer game where one team was made up of Long John Silver impersonators. See it on YouTube here, starting around 1:50.
  • An interviewer slowly turns into a Long John Silver impersonator, complete with quotes. On YouTube here.
  • The "Confuse a Cat" sketch.
• RTL Samstag Nacht (German equivalent of Saturday Night Live) has the pretty wacky character Märchenman playing with this. He has a parrot as a hand prothese, a hook at the Parrot Pet Position (which he calls "Frank, whom I may call little speaking hook sitting on the shoulder"). And his eyepatch on the mouth, and travels in a man-sized paper ship.
• Super Sentai: Navi the robotic parrot in Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger. Also the one responsible for leading the team towards the Greatest Treasure in the Universe through vague clues that only come about after she hits her head on the ceiling.
• Ultraman Trigger: New Generation Tiga has the Space Pirate villain, Alien Barossa, who has a juvenile Zandrias (the kaiju equivalent to a parrot) perched on its shoulder the whole episode. Until Barossa's death that is, at which point the Zandrias decides to pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here
• World's Dumbest... shows that this isn't limited to pirates — one clip features parrots employed by drug cartels to warn them when the police show up. As Wes Denning puts it, "Parrots need to stop hanging out with such shady characters."
• The Young Ones episode "Flood" had a cutaway scene with a literal pirate DJ (Robbie Coltrane) whose parrot kept making sarcastic remarks. The problem was, he couldn't see where the remarks were coming from because he wore an eyepatch — and he was a cyclops. When his bosun attempts to rightly blame the parrot for an insult, he denies owning one: "I hate the creatures! Horrible, small, furry things, hopping around, breeding and eating carrots!"

Pinballs

• Polly from Black Rose, who gives a random Video Mode reward. Interestingly enough, you can kill her by Button Mashing the Fire button, getting 2 million points in the process.

Pro Wrestling

• After Pirates of the Caribbean took off, Rey Bucanero dressed up Zacarias, one of CMLL's Mini-Estrellas, as a parrot.

Puppet Shows

• The Muppet Show:
  • In the John Cleese episode, he was on Pigs in Space as a space pirate and kept bickering with his parrot. He eventually threatened it with, "Quiet! Do you want to be an ex-parrot?"
  • In the Glenda Jackson episode, the same puppet is used for Eric the Pirate Parrot, who "Captain Black Jackson" smuggles into the theatre disguised as a penguin.
• Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island has a talking lobster named Polly. When Gonzo asks if he should have a parrot instead, Long John just seems confused.

Sports

• The Pittsburgh Pirates American baseball team have the Pirate Parrot for a mascot.

Tabletop Games

• The Asteroid 1618 supplement for the Encounter Critical game. Space pirates can buy space parrots at a pet store on the asteroid. The parrot costs 75 gold credits if it already knows pirate lingo, or only 25 gold credits if it needs to be taught.
• In the Paranoia adventure "Vapors Don't Shoot Back", the Big Bad pirate-wannabee Black-U-Brd has a parrot robot on his shoulder that repeats old pirate movie dialogue.
• Shadowrun supplement California Free State. Captain Monday of Moro Bay not only dresses like a pirate but has a parrot on one shoulder. A decker posts a message that it isn't a parrot but a miniaturized eyekiller, an Awakened (magical) creature that can fire lightning bolts.
• Warhammer:
  • Long Drong the dwarf pirate keeps a parrot named Bitsy that sits on his shoulder and repeats "bits o' gold, bits o' gold!"
  • Ogre Maneaters are ogres that have spent time in mercenary employ, keeping the costumes of their former jobs. One of the models is dressed as a pirate, but due to the size difference the position of parrot is occupied by a gnoblar.
• Warhammer 40,000: Ork Freebootaz often use squigs in a Parrot Pet Position to complete the Space Pirate image. This being 40K, squigs are vicious little bastards that are half mad and half teeth◊.

Theatre

• In the 2014 National Theatre production of Treasure Island, Long John Silver's pet parrot Captain Flint is a blue-and-yellow macaw. An animatronic puppet was used.

Theme Parks

• Disney Theme Parks: Pirates of the Caribbean features several, including a skeletal one in the pirate caves, a parrot singing "A Parrot's Life for Me" alongside the pirates, a parrot providing the exit safety spiel, a green parrot named Peg Leg Pete (no relation) that once functioned as the mascot of the Florida version, and a parrot interacting with Jack Sparrow in the present version of Florida's finale.
• The Europa-Park equivalent of Pirates of the Caribbean, Piraten in Batavia (set in the Dutch East Indies), had an animatronic parrot with a pirate captain hat atop a street lamp greeting visitors at its entrance before the ride's destruction in a fire in 2018. The rebuilt ride that opened in 2020 has one inside instead.

Video Games

• In Chrono Cross, the pirate Fargo has a Polly... except it's a giant MONSTER bird that acts as a boss fight for your party!
• Joseph Marrow, the boss of the 10th level in Claw, fights alongside his parrot, whom you need to attack first, and then rescues him when you're attacking him.
• Cursed Treasure 2 has the parrots carried by the pirate enemies. When the pirate is defeated, they release a parrot mook that moves quickly and will fly over water towards your gems.
• The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark: One of the ancestral portraits in Castle Dooley is of an ancestor who went to sea after her thieving ways made life on land too hot. McQueen notes that the bird on her shoulder is actually a pigeon painted red and green.
• You can find a parrot in Dubloon in Atlan Island dungeon. Her function is to activate switches and collect keys found behind a wall or locked doors.
• Fallen London: Blue Prophets sometimes take the role for certain pirates, and one of them will certainly take the role for you if you chose the path of the Gaider's Mourn corsair. It bears mentioning that these parrots have a lot more authority than you'd expect, and are often the ones calling targets for the pirates to sink and murder. It is said that Blue Prophets call out the names of those about to die, and this is true because they are marking them for death.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Raz, a minor character from Final Fantasy XII, can always be seen with a small parrot over his head.
  • The early game dungeon Sastasha from Final Fantasy XIV is pirate-themed, so naturally the pirate captain Madison has a squawking companion whenever he shows up in it. Technically it's not a parrot, but a very talkative Colibri — small toucan-like beasts that often live in Eorzea's tropical climates. In the hard mode version of the dungeon, when the entire pirate crew has been turned into hideous beasts, this chatty bird is still loyal to the captain. If you're particularly lucky, though, you can win it as a shoulder-riding minion.
• Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft: The Grand Tournament set parodied this with a pirate riding a giant parrot, featured in the trailer.
• Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier: Some of the Sky Pirates in Far Drop City come with actual parrots.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • You're actually required to have a parrot (or at least the item "stuffed shoulder parrot") as part of a pirate disguise.
  • There's also an Exotic Parrot familiar. If you try to name it "Polly", the game automatically renames your Parrot "Unoriginality".
• Legend of Legaia: In Legaia II: Duel Saga, Sharon has one, inherited from her late father and former captain of the pirates, Alphis. Completing a sidequest will lead to said parrot revealing the location of Alphis's treasure, including an extremely rare Heaven's Secret.
• The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: The Sky Pirate captain Skabb carries around two bat-winged parrots, Scratch and Sniff, on his shoulders. In a twist, they're actually far more intelligent than he is and are the real leaders of the pirate fleet.
• Little Alchemy: The recipe for "parrot" is "pirate" + "bird".
• MacBat 64: Journey of a Nice Chap: One of the NPCs you encounter is a parrot wearing a pirate hat.
• Monkey Island: Parrots are seen throughout the series.
  • Monkey Island mocks this one (then it again, it mocks every Pirate trope possible), in the first game: Meathook keeps a classic parrot locked up because it's "scary". In Escape from Monkey Island, when asked what he wanted in a pirate Caricature, Guybrush can choose to say he wants a parrot when he adds the following:
    Guybrush: Nothing says "I'm a mighty pirate" like animal abuse.
  • And then there is the half-magic parrot made of pyrite in Tales of Monkey Island. But what kind of idiot would actually carry that thing around?
    Parrot: *Squawk* It's me, Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate!
• The game of the film Muppet Treasure Island features a parrot called Stevenson (as in Robert Louis) as the Exposition Fairy.
• In Nancy Drew: Legend of the Crystal Skull, Iggy's pirate costume consists of a strap-on cutlass, a tricorn hat with a skull-and-crossbones emblem, and a lace ruff with a blue-and-yellow plastic parrot mounted over one shoulder. Iggy, by the way, is an iguana.
• The Captain in Pirates Vikings and Knights has a pet parrot that he can sic on his opponents.
• In Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time, the Pirate Captain Zombies have Zombie Parrots that steal your plants.
• Parrots naturally show up in Puzzle Pirates, although they are fairly rare.
• The smuggler in both Ratchet & Clank Future games is accompanied by a parrot-like alien. Ironically, there are actual pirates in the games, none of whom have parrots.
• In the 1993 Edutainment Game Redhook's Revenge one of the player characters is a parrot among humans. Poseidon the parrot captains his own ship and crew, competing for booty against some of the most notorious pirates to ever set sail, such as Blackbeard himself.
• In RuneScape, a quest involving pirates allows you to get an "Ex-Ex-Parrot" as a pet.
• Chosokabe Motochika from Sengoku Basara owns a large yellow parrot that wears a bandana on its head. It's more intelligent than most of his crew and can apparently speak, though the only words it's been heard saying are "Motochika" and "treasure".
• Sid Meier's Pirates!: If the barkeep doesn't have anything useful to say, he'll usually ask the main character "Where's your parrot?" This can get stupidly hilarious when you've actually modded parrots into the game.
• In The Sims Medieval expansion "Pirates and Nobles," most NPC pirates have parrots, and Hero Sims can get them whether they're members of a pirate crew or not.
• In Skies of Arcadia, Gilder has a parrot that helps him get out of jail. His name is Willy.
• The pirate-themed action game Skull & Crossbones have you playing as a pirate, with your parrot companion flying around you, staying well out of range from enemy's attacks and telling you "Let's move! Let's move! Squawrk!" if you took too long to finish an area.
• In Sly 3: Honor Among Thieves, the major pirates are both parrots, in reference to this trope.
• In Terraria, parrots are a type of enemy that can show up in the Pirate Invasion in Hardmode. Once you get the Pirate NPC, you can talk to him to buy a Parrot Cracker (the second-most expensive item in the game), which summons a passive version as a pet.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: The Pirate's Clothes Flavor Text references the connection between pirates and parrots:
  Missing: one shoulder parrot. Please contact the authorities.
• Your explorer can find a rather foul-mouthed one in The Wager.
• In World Heroes, Captain Kidd has a bird that perches on his shoulder in his animations. It seems to be a condor, and as such is basically a more badass version of a parrot.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Pirate enemies in will occasionally have parrot pets with them. It's also possible for players to purchase a parrot pet in the pirates-filled town of Booty Bay.
  • Some pirates have giant attack parrots guarding their ships!
  • If you gain reputation with the Bloodsail Buccaneers faction, you can eventually get a captain's hat that summons a pet parrot.
• In Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, Captain Barbaros adopts a parrot native to the island of Seiren which he trains to speak in order to quickly and effectively deliver messages between Castaway Village and your party wherever you are on the island.

Web Original

• Freefall:
  • Parodied: after Sam suggests that he and his crew become space pirates, Helix adopts an emu and names it "Polly", suggesting that it would be more threatening than a parrot.
    Sam: I know I'd be respectful of a pirate with an emu on his shoulder.
  • This was after thinking that Florence had to join them in piracy, because only she has a shoulder that a parrot could really perch on.
• Happy Tree Friends: Russell the pirate sea otter keeps a parrot as an alarm clock, as seen in the episode "Sea What I Found".
• The Onion has this article on the proper care and feeding of Pirate Parrots, by a "Captain Crimson Bannister". Extra points for being written completely in pirate-speak.
• Pirates SMP: Two of the cast's stream chats manifest as parrots in-universe — Kyle's are normal parrots, while Sausage's are explicitly ghost parrots.
• In Think Before You Think, Brian's pirate costume includes a real parrot.

Western Animation

• In the The Adventures of Puss in Boots episode "Parrot Booty", Two-Eyed Alonso once had a pet parrot named Bonky who left to rule a skeleton army, until Puss took the Skeleton Ring from him. He returns in the season 6 episode "Flock the Boat", now leading a gang of thieves dressed as parrots, and wants either Alsonso or Puss to be his parrot!
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The head pirate in "The Waterbending Scroll" has a pet "reptile-bird," (looking closer to an Archaeopteryx than a parrot) which makes Sokka realize...
  Sokka: You guys are pirates!
  Pirate: We prefer to think of ourselves as "high-risk traders".
• Camp Lazlo: Lazlo and his friends create a doll from canned meat, which gains sentience and attacks the campers in revenge by transforming into various shapes — one of them being a pirate with a meat parrot on his shoulder.
• Casper's Scare School: During Casper's trip to Scare School, he meets a blind pirate and his seeing eye parrot who sail a flying ship to pick up students.
• Young Blood in his pirate appearance in Danny Phantom has a skeletal one. Spent most of the time correcting pirate lingo and acting cynical. Later on, when he'd adopted a cowboy motif instead, it turned into a skeletal horse — apparently it's a shapeshifter that assumes the form of whatever animal it finds most appropriate for whatever identity its master has assumed. But it's a Servile Snarker in any form.
• The Doctor Who Animated Adaptation serial "The Infinite Quest" features Baltazhar, who supposedly is some kind of a intergalactic overlord, terror of the spaceways, but is dressed in a red and white stripey shirt, with a futuristic Hook Hand. He's got two Pirate Parrots, but both of them the size of a car. Needless to say they don't actually sit on his shoulder.
• In DuckTales, the Sky Pirates led by Don Karnage have a pet parrot called No-Name the Nameless Parrot, whereas the Ghost Pirate Captain Peghook is an anthropomorphic parrot.
• The Fairly OddParents!, "Odd-Pirates". Timmy, Poof, Wanda, and Cosmo encounter a pirate named Dirtybeard who is actually friendly but whose parrot is evil. Additionally, the sports team that Timmy wanted to see in the same episode, known as "The Pirates", have a parrot as a mascot.
• Family Guy, episode "Long John Peter". Peter steals a parrot and starts carrying it around with him. He starts dressing as a pirate, recruits three other pirates and starts terrorizing the town. His parrot is severely injured during the fighting and later dies at the veterinarian's office.
• An alien Space Pirate from Futurama has three parrots — on three of his four shoulders.
• Futz!: The pirate captain in "High Seas Futz" has a HUGE muscular parrot dressed in pirate garb.
• Shipwreck from G.I. Joe is a good guy, a dedicated sailor, and Loveable Rogue, with a talking parrot named Polly who never seems to shut up. The latest incarnation of Shipwreck in IDW comics continuity has a Polly of his own — in this case, a small flying drone. It's specifically meant to evoke the image of a pirate's pet parrot (for marketing purposes), but with an actual combat application.
• Jake and the Never Land Pirates: The good pirates have the talkative parrot Skully on their team.
• Captain Walker D. Plank from James Bond Jr.. He fits the traditional pirate stereotype to the extent that even his parrot has an eyepatch and a wooden leg.
• Parodied in the Johnny Bravo episode "Moby Jerk", in which Captain Spleen had a different bird on his shoulder every time he was on camera (including a bucket of fried chicken at one point).
• Looney Tunes: In the 1948 Warner Bros. cartoon "Buccaneer Bunny", "Sea-Goin' Sam" (a pirate version of Yosemite Sam) has a parrot that follows Bugs Bunny around pointing out his hiding places. Bugs asks the parrot "Polly want a cracker?", and when the parrot agrees, gives him a lit firecracker. Bye bye Polly!

• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: In "Ben-Boozled", the captain masquerading as a parrot (in paper-thin disquise) becomes the pet of another pirate who thinks he is the most beautiful bird he's ever seen.
• Captain Hook has one named Short Tom in Peter Pan & the Pirates; it doesn't talk, but it got itself (and Hook's crew) into trouble a lot.
• The Pirates of Dark Water:
  • Niddler, a parrot-monkey thing is one of the main characters. He's kind of The Scrappy, but whatever.
  • Also, one of the villains keeps a little parrot-like beast on his shoulder. In turn with the depiction of Merians using animals as devices, it is a living dictaphone, known as a "memorrot". What it knows becomes a plot point.
• The Real Ghostbusters episode "Sea Fright" had the heroes battle a crew of Ghost Pirates, the captain Jack Higgins having an zombie parrot that drove him crazy. Captain Jack Higgins said sarcastically he'd kill it "if it weren't already dead."
• In the Rocko's Modern Life episode, Mr. Bighead starts sleepwalking, dreaming that he's a pirate. He sees Rocko's house as an enemy ship, and Spunky as a parrot, which he steals in order to extort a treasure map from Rocko.
• In Roger Ramjet, Red Dog the Pirate is a short, squat scourge of the seven seas with a wise acre parrot named Carl Bob for a sidekick.
• The Simpsons:
  • "The Mansion Family" has Homer borrowing a cruise ship from Mr. Burns, which is boarded by pirates. Their captain has an absurdly large number of parrots perched on him, and Homer's attempt to fight him merely knocks the parrots off his body one by one.
  • And of course, Pirate Captains use to write their treasure maps on crackers and give them to their parrots for safe keepin'. That's why there is treasure everywhere... well, according to Bart anyway.
• On SpongeBob SquarePants, Patchy the Pirate has a parrot named Potty who he doesn't get along with at all.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars features Hondo Ohnaka, usually with a Kowakian Monkey Lizard on his shoulders. In the Star Wars universe, monkey lizards are bird-like mischief makers who are actually smarter than they look, hence one of them managing to swipe Count Dooku's lightsaber and another one able to fumble through the operation of a tank.
• Captain Clump, a one-episode character from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, had a parrot named Patches.
• Those Scurvy Rascals: The pirates have a parrot with a very large beak.

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