Polly Wants a Microphone

aka: Talking Bird

"I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but 'Mortimer,' and give it him"

— Hotspur, Henry IV, Part 1

Possibly the most common type of Intellectual Animal is a talking bird, and you know you've seen it already. Parrots, ravens, mynah birds (Asian starlings, in a nutshell) and other birds capable of mimicking human speech are likely to be outright fully intelligent and articulate. Most common in settings where there is an element of the fantastic that can be used to Hand Wave the inaccuracy, but even fairly mundane, realistic stories sometimes do it. Someone who Speaks Fluent Animal is not needed here (but may show up nonetheless).

Be careful if you're talking about something you want to keep a secret — Not in Front of the Parrot!!

See also Idiot Crows. Not to be confused with the other definition of "mouthy", in that case see Mouthy Bird for birds with expressive mouths.

---

Examples:

Advertising

• Windex has a commercial that features two naughty talking crows that trick a guy by closing his glass door.
• Inverted in one of ESPN's Winter X Games XV commercials of 2011, in which two snow owls are "talking" with subtitles.
• A 2019 Discover Card commercial features a customer, Kevin, whose macaw, Timmy, had learned his social security number and password, and was constantly repeating them.
  Agent: Timmy want a cracker?
  Kevin: Timmy, do you want a cracker?
  Timmy: What do you think, Kevin?
  Kevin: No.

Anime & Manga

• Hippo in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch is a talking penguin. Fuku-chan might also count, but he never speaks in bird form, so we don't know whether he can't or whether he's just shutting up while undercover.
• Averted, oddly, in Pokémon: The Series, with the parrot Pokémon Chatot. It's known for repeating human speech, all Pokémon are supposedly sentient, with a large number (The humanoid and psychics in particular) appearing sapient, and a cat Pokemon learned human language and speaks it fluently. But every time a Chatot is featured it just mimics human words without understanding them like a real-life parrot.
• Digimon naturally has talking bird Mons; Piyomon, Hawkmon, and Falcomon have been used as partners.
• Aversion: Princess Tutu's Ahiru/Duck is about the only sentient animal in the series that doesn't talk unless transformed into a human girl.
• The second season of Yes! Pretty Cure 5 has Syrup, at least in mascot and "birdplane" form.
• The crows Oboe and Ocarina, Hamel and Sizer's companions (respectively) in Violinist of Hameln. Justified in that they were originally winged humanoids cursed to turn into crows.
• In Idaten Jump, Hosuke the owl. He's actually a human old man trapped in an owl's form.
• Inko-chan from Toradora!. Despite being utterly incapable of saying its own name, it seems to always be saying the right thing (or at least, things that are appropriate for the situation) at the right time. Even more pronounced in the novels, where it's even capable of breaking out in cold sweats in respond to a threat from Taiga.
• Dera Mochimazzui in Tamako Market, who talks and and is sentient enough to know what he is talking about. He's on a mission to find a bride for the prince of an island nation, and the female protagonist made an Accidental Proposal with the bird.
• Kir from King of Bandit Jing.
• Mr. Puffin, a puffin that serves as the constant companion of Iceland in Hetalia: Axis Powers, has a rough attitude and speaking pattern despite his cute looks. It's especially evident in his attempts at hijacking Iceland's character song. Amusingly, Iceland orders him to remain silent when in the company of other people, as Iceland thinks it would make him look strange to others if he was seen talking to a bird.
• Kokapetl the parrot from The Mysterious Cities of Gold. Though his habit of reminding Tao to remember his ancestors could be something he was taught, there is plenty of evidence that he actually understands what he is saying. For example, he will often call something to the attention of the human characters by telling them to "come and see" and provides early warning of danger on more than one occasion.

Comic Books

• Matthew the talking raven and his predecessors in The Sandman (1989).
• Carl Barks had two parrot characters, Yellow Beak, and Joe from Singapore. Both are fully intelligent, but neither are very anthropomorphic (especially compared to the Parrot character José Carioca). Magica DeSpell's raven was similar.
• The National Lampoon had a long-running comic strip "Chicken Gutz" by Randall Enos. The eponymous Butt-Monkey character had a bird perched on top of his hat, who provided constant snarky commentary on the proceedings.
• Mr. Eleven from Ghost Rider, a talking crow that leads people to make deals with the devil.
• Jommeke: Jommeke's pet parrot Flip is able to communicate in articulate sentences and converses with everybody. All other parrots in this comic strip share the same gift.
• Ellsworth from the Mickey Mouse Comic Universe was introduced as this: he was Goofy's pet mynah bird, the joke being that the pet was smarter than the owner. Given the setting, however, readers who don't know Ellsworth's origin story likely see him as just one Funny Animal in a world full of them.
• Nero: Beo, Meneer Pheip's beo, is also able to talk with people, make speeches, and is cleverer than the average bird of his species. At one point he meets a female beo in the Indian jungle, who is just a normal bird who can only squawk.
• In Condorito Matías the Parrot can talk. As the comic book is basically the re-telling of all kinds of traditional Latin American jokes, Matias appears mostly in parrot-related jokes. This is also a case of Furry Confusion as his owner Condorito is an anthropomorphic condor.

Comic Strips

• Mutts: One Shelter Story◊ features a talking parrot named Romeo. He informs the reader that there are many talking birds looking for new homes, and encourages them to visit their local shelter and "I'll tell you all about it."
• Pearls Before Swine: When Rat becomes a pet psychic and uses it to his advantage by straight-up lying to the pets' owners about what they're thinking for his own gain, a parrot named Pepe winds up exposing his being a fraud.
  "Pepe can talk and Pepe says you're an unmitigated fraud."

Films — Animation

• Iago from Aladdin. A line in The Return of Jafar implies that Jafar taught him, possibly using magic. For most of the original movie, Iago pretends to be a regular parrot when in the presence of characters other than Jafar. He drops this after the protagonists turn on Jafar, though, and no one in-universe seems particularly surprised by his fluent speech.
  • Word of God has stated that Iago gained the ability to speak as a result of Jafar transferring part of his personality into Iago in order to get rid of his unwanted personality traits.
  • Subverted in the live-action remake where Iago loses his bombastic personality and is instead portrayed as a normal parrot with only mild sentience, and above average speech abilities.
• Inverted in Rio, where all the parrots are able to talk, but none of the humans can understand them. In fact, they can actually talk to other birds and animals, but they cannot talk to people.
• Merlin's "highly educated", snide and sarcastic pet owl, Archimedes, in The Sword in the Stone, of course.
• Tad, the Lost Explorer has a funny subversion. Belzoni, Sara's pet parrot, has human-level intelligence, is able to play poker, do mimic and communicate with signs... but he's mute.

Films — Live Action

• Carry On Behind has a talking mynah bird, whose vocabulary is mostly innuendo and rude words:
  Mynah Bird: Oh, what a beauty.
  Arthur: You're round here somewhere, mate, I can hear you.
  Mynah Bird: Get stuffed!
  Arthur: And that's how you're going to end up.
• Up in Smoke: A talking mynah bird lives in Strawberry's house, and some jokes result as he starts answering the door ("Pedro's not here!"). The last joke comes when Strawberry (armed to the teeth) hears the bird parrot a drug raid that's already come and gone. The shell-shocked Strawberry (off-screen) silences the bird with a gunshot.
• 102 Dalmatians has Waddlesworth, a green-winged macaw who thinks he's a dog (a Rottweiler, to be exact), and is voiced by Eric Idle.
• Scary Movie 2 had a very foul-mouthed parrot that at one pointed started begging to be killed.
• Pirates of the Caribbean has Cotton's parrot. It speaks for its owner, who had his tongue cut out. While it cannot speak fluently (it speaks in various short phrases, which the other pirates interpret), its phrase selection is a good deal larger than the standard.
  • It eventually learned a phrase that the crew understood perfectly in Dead Man's Chest: "Don't Eat Me!" as the cannibals apprehended them.
• Home Alone 3 has that wise-cracking Amazon parrot kept by Alex's older brother, Stan.
• The Survivors begins with Robin Williams getting fired by his boss's parrot. No, really.
• The title character of Paulie is such a parrot; the catch is that every other parrot in the movie isn't, and most humans have difficulty believing that Paulie is.
  • He also can't communicate with other birds.
  • He almost became famous, but during the press-conference switched to "Polly want a cracker" type talk instead to spite the scientist who tricked him.
• Deep Blue Sea has Preacher's foul-mouthed parrot, who's later eaten by a shark.
• Laserbeak from Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a talking robot bird, though it's justified given that he's an extraterrestrial mechanical life form.
• Prehysteria features a miniature pterodactyl that can do this.
• Mac from The Real Macaw is a macaw capable of speech.
• In Malcolm, the protagonist's cockatoo Arnold knows how to say "Thanks a lot!"

Literature

• In All I Know About Animal Behavior, I Learned in Loehmann's Dressing Room, Erma Bombeck relates owning a bird named Barney who knew only two phrases: "Hello, Barney" and "Telephone!" She tried training him further with a tape, but quit and gave Barney to one of her kids after three weeks of said tape succeeded only in exasperating her and causing her husband to say one of the tape's phrases.
• The Ur-Example (at least as far as this trope's horror potential goes) is Edgar Allan Poe's famous raven in the poem "The Raven." The narrator begs of the bird to answer increasingly desperate questions about the afterlife and the hope of reuniting with his Lost Lenore, but the raven constantly answers, "Nevermore", rather pessimistically. The last stanza suggests that the bird has taken up permanent residence, and is less bird than evil portent of despair and damnation. You know, typical Poe.
  • The narrator actually lampshades the fact that there's nothing inherently supernatural about ravens learning to speak basic words - people train them to do it all the time - and initially suspects it's nothing more than an escaped pet. One possible interpretation of the poem is that the bird's supernatural nature, maybe even its existence, is a product of the narrator's own grief-stricken delusions.
• Discworld has two: Quoth, the raven (har dee har har), and the parrot in Eric. Both have limited wossnames... vocabularies, especially the parrot. Which led to the splendid line (from the parrot) "Wossname wossname wossname wossname wossname!"
• One of the major secondary characters in Martha Walks the Dog is a parrot, which is the only other animal in the neighborhood that can speak in human language.
• From the children's book series Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, the main character's parrot Penelope was originally depicted realistically, but in the last book of the series she was an Intellectual Animal.
• The Unkindness of Ravens, a story about a researcher trying to boost animal intelligence. His only success had been with the ravens. They eventually wanted to leave the lab to have chicks. The story had one raven return to talk with the scientist. They figured out that the intelligence (and speech) couldn't be made hereditary. They'd have to come back and be altered.
• Doctor Dolittle's parrot, Polynesia, was the one that taught him to speak animal, noting in many adaptations that she is almost two centuries old and has learned several languages herself in that time.
• Children's author Dick King-Smith generally just wrote about animals talking to each other, but two novels featured key exceptions;
  • Pretty Polly, in which Abigail is able to teach her pet hen Polly how to talk. However, this is portrayed as a relatively non-sentient example, as Polly can only repeat what is spoken to her at first and only responds to "What's your name?" with a consistently intelligible answer later on, although she does learn a wide range of phrases.
  • Harry's Mad sees Harry Holdsworth inherit his great-uncle George's pet parrot Madison, and soon learns that Madison is able to freely talk back to Harry, which is attributed to the fact that George Holdsworth was a professor of linguistics and was therefore able to give Madison thorough instruction. Later in the book, Madison is able to pass on these lessons to another parrot, Fweddy (who is later revealed to be female when she lays an egg).
• Kehaar from Watership Down, except that he's speaking animal language, not English.
  • When first introduced, Kehaar speaks "hedge", the lingua franca of the world, but later learns Lapine, the native tongue of the rabbits.
• Ravens in American Gods are fully articulate and intelligent, which is hardly surprising, them being Odin's companions and whatnot. Shadows asks one to quoth "Nevermore". The raven is not amused.
  Raven: Fuck you.
• J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit has talking ravens, including Roac son of Carc, the chief of the ravens of the Lonely Mountain.
• Peach (which is short for Machu Picchu, but the full name is rarely used) in the Young Wizards series, although this one may be justified by the fact that exposure to wizardry has said to have altered all of Tom and Carl's pets, not to mention that she's one of the Powers That Be in disguise.
• Oreb in Gene Wolfe's Books of the Short Sun.
• Madison, the African Grey in the Dick King-Smith novel Harry's Mad and its TV adaptation.
• Averted in the Alternate History Alien Invasion novel In the Balance by Harry Turtledove. One of the aliens is quite excited on discovering there's an animal called a parrot who'll say exactly what it's told, as their human collaborator is refusing to make further propaganda broadcasts. The collaborator is tempted to let the aliens make idiots of themselves, but reluctantly informs them that no human would take anything said by a parrot seriously.
• One novel in Erle Stanley Gardner's lengthy Perry Mason series, The Case of the Perjured Parrot, turns on the eponymous parrot (it doesn't exactly testify, but it is observed that its claws are cut too short, which is a clue to the murderer). In the television adaptation, it was voiced by Mel Blanc.
• The Dark Tower and A Song of Ice and Fire both have talking ravens. For the most part, they just seem to act like parrots, but it's implied they are capable of comprehending human speech.
  • Jeor Mormont's white raven in A Song of Ice and Fire at first seems to only be unusual in that it's able to speak at all, only using this to ask for corn and repeat people's names and taught phrases. However, its tendency to say unusually apropos things has several characters suspicious that it's smarter than it looks.
  • This universe also has people with the ability to move their consciousness into animals. So the most popular theory behind the inexplicably apropos sayings of Mormont's raven is that a particular person was speaking through him.
• The titular character in Charles Dickens' Barnaby Rudge has a talking raven that likes to shout "I'm a devil!"
• In the Garrett, P.I. series, the Goddamn Parrot, aka "Mr. Big", is given to Garrett by a friend as a joke. Operating under its own power, it's incredibly foul-mouthed, and prone to saying things he fears will get him lynched ("Help! Rape! Please, mister, don't make me do that again!"). When operating under the psychic control of the Dead Man, it becomes a mouthpiece and perpetual nag for Garrett's partner.
• One of the early Animorphs books has the group morphing parrots to tell off a seedy restaurant that's mistreating the birds. They start yelling things at the potential customers that drive them away.
• Parodied in The Areas of My Expertise, where these attributes - and, indeed, the Shakespearean page quote - are modified so that they apply to lobsters. Lobsters are introduced to America because of the Shakespeare passage and there's a failed attempt at establishing them as popular pets, but then everyone realizes that they are ugly, violent little animals, so instead the lobsters just get eaten.
• In The Hunger Games, talking birds are mentioned to have been used for espionage, but this stopped after the people being spied on caught on and started giving out false information to the birds.
• Next (2006), which features a genetically uplifted parrot. Unfortunately, he seems to be surrounded by humans too stupid to recognize how intelligent he is.
• When The Robbers Came To Cardamom Town features a talking and singing parrot as well as a talking and singing camel.
• Ray Bradbury's short story "The Parrot Who Met Papa" features a parrot who memorized the unpublished last novel of Ernest Hemingway.
• By the time the Xandri Corelel series takes place, parrots have been selectively bred and genetically modified to be even smarter than they are now, so Xandri's parrots Marbles and Cake both have very impressive vocabularies. Marbles in particular is said to be intelligent even for his kind - he knows 1128 words, can utter relatively complicated sentenced like "Millet now for smart birdie", and can even participate in conversations to a limited extent.

Live Action TV

• In The Adventures of Superman episode "The Haunted Lighthouse", the mysterious "Help! I'm drowning!" calls come from a parrot.
• In The Avengers (1960s) episode "The Bird Who Knew Too Much", Captain Crusoe, who Steed and Mrs Peel are told is a courier, eventually turns out to be a parrot that an eccentric bird-trainer had taught to not only memorise complex phrases, but only recite them on a signal, and which the baddies had stolen and were teaching secret information, which would then be received by their bosses when the bird exhibition Crusoe was part of went on tour to ... some other country.
• Gilligan's Island: In "Angel on the Island", a parrot imitates Gilligan while he and the Skipper are calling for Ginger. When the Skipper asks what Gilligan thought of his performance as Marc Antony, the parrot again repeats Gilligan's uncomplimentary words about the topic, as well as telling the Skipper who said them.
• An episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys had Hercules turned into a pig and eventually meet a parrot who he can speak with through Animal Talk (where it didn't have the stereotypical parrot voice), and which could speak to people through Polly Wants A Microphone (where it did), and could translate between the two.
• On The Young Ones, a pirate is insulted by his own parrot. Subverted in that the pirate thinks the parrot is a dog (he keeps it on a leash) and assumes his boatswain is the one who insulted him, because dogs can't talk.
• The Munsters have a talking Crow voiced by Mel Blanc no less.
• In the pilot of Something is Out There, Jack Breslin goes back to his apartment where he left Ta'Ra and finds the place ransacked by the Monster of the Week and Ta'Ra missing. After the requisite Cat Scare involving Jack's pet parrot, Jack says out loud, "Where the hell could she be?" The parrot obligingly informs him (out shopping).

Radio

• Parodied in an episode of John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, in which two parrots have a coherent conversation, but also have to keep stopping in order to mindlessly repeat the last thing the other one said.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • Raven familiars can speak. A Wizard Did It (or Sorcerer, or Adapt, or Hexblade, Dread Necromancer or arcane caster with the right feat)
  • Players who have shapeshifted into an animal can no longer speak, and can only use that animal's natural vocalizations. 3rd edition sourcebooks specifically note that shapeshifting into a parrot is not a way to get around this, as a parrot's natural vocalization is just squawking.
  • The "Stormwrack" source book officially introduced parrot familiars that are mechanically identical to ravens. Players probably took parrot familiars and used the statistics for ravens even earlier than that.
• Taken to extreme in Los Angeles 2035 where there are translator parrots. Ok, they are mutated birds, but still...

Theme Parks

• The Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland and the Tropical Serenade (and later the Enchanted Tiki Room (Under New Management)) at Walt Disney World feature singing animatronic birds with distinct personalities, all fluent in English.
• Carousel of Progress: Grandma’s parrot (voiced by Mel Blanc) complains about her constantly playing the radio.
• Duncan, Captain Oceaneer's parrot at Typhoon Lagoon's "Miss Fortune Falls" is very vocal.

Video Games

• Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: The birds will exhibit this if you hide. But only one is a parrot (the rest are ravens), and if you're not hiding, it says the stock parrot phrases (and, for some reason, "Shine get!"). The parrot drops the act after the end of the chapter, though.
• Sorcerer has Belboz's talking parrot, Pollibar, who provides a crucial clue to getting out of the Hall of Enchanters at the beginning of the game.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has two myna birds, and, while they both talk, one of them is a bit of a subversion: she doesn't like talking to humans and will only interact with Wolf Link (who can understand all animals), offering a minigame.
• Starship Titanic features a very screechy parrot voiced by former Python Terry Jones. Who loves eating chicken. The Kea is a type of parrot that would indeed enjoy eating chicken.
• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: One case uses a talking parrot as a crucial witness to a case. Mildly subverted in that the parrot is never implied to be especially intelligent. Instead, the key lies in which specific words the parrot was trained to repeat.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has a parakeet that may or may not be intelligent because it's possessed by the spirit of a genius hacker. Did we mention this is the point the game starts to get really weird?
• Streetpass Mii Plaza: In Mii Trek, your guide, Sir Henry Beaksley, is a talking toucan.
• Mystery Case Files: 13th Skull has Mr. Crickets, Charlotte Landry's talking parrot.
• Knights in the Nightmare: Vienya's familiar Moja. Just how intelligent Moja is, we don't know — he does communicate telepathically with Vienya, though, and is capable of translating for her in only slightly clipped Japanese (complete with kanji). Justified because, well, he's her familiar, and that's what he's there for (she's a selective mute and can't/won't communicate in any other way).
• Nancy Drew: Loulou and Coucou are both capable of giving you hints, and appeasing their wishes is required to progress in both games in which they appear.
• StarTropics: Peter the talking parrot. You have to bribe him with worms to get him to talk, and what he says is a clue to the puzzle in Captain Bell's tomb. He's also the great-grandson of the original Captain Bell's pet parrot.
• The Granstream Saga has the talking parrot Korky. He claims he's a spirit beast, but none seems to believe him.
• Ultima VII: The Black Gate: Parrots have only a few lines of normal conversation (putting them on the same level as most town guards...) but if you threaten them with a gavel, they will tell the location of the hidden treasure in a bid to get you to spare them. Curiously, all parrots in the game know this secret, so perhaps they have a terrifying hive mind going.
• LEGO Island has Mr. and Mrs. Pollywanna, a pair of talking parrots who also act as the Brickolinis' telephone.
• The Sims 2: You can teach a parrot (Or a kestrel, because it's really just a palette swap.) to talk, and your sims can have full-on conversations with it once it learns. Of course, it, like your Sim, will still be Speaking Simlish.
• Grandia II gives us Ryudo's pet falcon Skye (Skye would disagree).
• Glass (2006) features such a parrot—as the protagonist. You're locked in a cage, but by saying the right words at the right time you can influence the train of thought of the people talking in the room, and make their conversation reach one of the different outcomes.
• The Ultimate Haunted House: There is a talking parrot found in the menagerie, who gives hints to complete the game. It can be fed items in order to make him lay eggs, or attacked, tortured, or fried by electricity to create a "roast bird".
• The Elder Scrolls: In the backstory, there existed a race of Bird Men native to what would become the Imperial City Isle in central Cyrodiil. When first approached by Aldmeri explorers, the Bird Men spoke back in Aldmeris, surprising the Aldmer. However, they quickly realized that the Bird Men were only repeating their own words back to them. Despite this, the Aldmeri were able to teach them to actually speak their own words and to write, for which the Bird Men were grateful. They declared Topal, the leader of the Aldmeri explorers, to be their lord and offered him their islands.
• My Friend Is A Raven: The titular raven has conversations with Lutum.
• Castle, Forest, Island, Sea has three talking birds, a blackbird, robin and owl. And they're chatty.
• Island Saver: Kiwi the parrot offers advice and prompts to the player. He also serves as somewhat of a narrator.

Webcomics

• Blackwing, Vaarsuvius's raven familiar in The Order of the Stick. Not bothering to speak Common at first because of a strained relation with V, he proved since the start of the fifth book to be quite smart. However, he is a familiar, so he grows smarter as his master becomes more powerful.
• Lewis from The Bird Feeder has tried on occasion to speak to humans. However, in #48, "Mimicry", he reveals that despite him merely asking politely for a bowl of food, the humans tend not to have very good reactions to him.
• In 70-Seas and Latchkey Kingdom "Babble finches" are used as translator macrobes trained to repeat their owner's words in a different language. They don't seem to be sapient, in spite of their usually accurate translations, with the exception of Lexi's "defective" finch.

Web Original

• DSBT InsaniT: Perry the parrot. Snake even notes how fluently he can speak.
• How to Hero claims that that parrots are infinitely smarter than most human children and would therefore make better sidekicks.

Western Animation

• In the Samurai Jack episode "Jack and the Farting Dragon" (seriously), the secretive Scissorsmith's attempts to keep Jack from discovering the dragon's location (because he didn't want a customer to leave without buying anything) are foiled by his... wife, who was turned into a talking crow by a wizard the Scissorsmith had angered.
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero depicted Shipwreck's parrot, Polly as capable of speech. She was also frequently implied to be smarter than her owner.
• The Flintstones The Movie's dictabird.
  • Also the original Flintstones series and its spinoffs would make use of various talking birds for some of its Stone Age devices (such as office intercoms).
• Maya & Miguel's pet parrot, Paco.
• The Tom and Jerry movie Shiver Me Whiskers has two pirate captains each with a parrot that has to translate for them because both pirates are unintelligible.
• With The Casagrandes (alongside its parent franchise) being set in a regularly down-to-earth cartoon universe, talking animals simply don't exist here. However, due to parrots being able to mimic human speech in real life, Sergio gets a pass and the writers are allowed to exaggerate his "human" traits as much as they want, to the point where they've basically turned him into an equal among the humans in the world.
• Digit from Cyberchase, who happens to be voiced by Iago's voice actor.
• Needle from Conan the Adventurer.
• An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes has a bird that supposedly only said "Grunk" and "Snark". When Jimmy finds out it can speak perfect English, he's surprised, to which Heloise asks "Where are you from?"
• Professor Pericles, one of the main villains of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated. When he first appears (in which his first line is offscreen), Velma comments how parrots can mimic human speech, but the prison officer notes it's the first thing he's said in decades. He speaks normally (with a German accent) throughout the show.
• In the Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa episode "Cow Pirates of Swampy Cove", Cowlorado Kid successfully interrogates Longhorn Silver's parrot about the whereabouts of Longhorn Silver and his crew.
• One of the members of Los Trotamúsicos is a rooster.
• The Smurfs' villain witch Chlorydris has a talking toucan as sidekick.
• Arty the toucan in Adventures of the Gummi Bears also can talk in a world were all non-magical animals (you know, aside from the eponymous gummi bears) are normal and can't talk.
• Beatrice the bluebird is a talking bird companion in Over the Garden Wall, of course this is because she was Once Human.
• In the Pound Puppies (2010) episode "Squawk", the Mayor's pet parrot turns out to be able to speak without copying what other people say at the end of the episode, stating that he plans to fly to Costa Rica and that he prefers being called Mr. Squawkers (the name Niblet gave him).
• Flip from Pet Alien is an alien who resembles a parrot and can talk. However, it's difficult to decipher what he's saying; he frequently speaks in gibberish with only the last few words being anything coherent.

Real Life

• Dr. Irene Pepperberg set out to prove whether parrots could actually converse with words, and not just mimic or respond with answers they learned, as they were thought to be limited to in the past. She bought an African Gray Parrot at random, named Alex, and proved that parrots can actually be taught the meaning of words and apply them. Alex had a vocabulary of about 150 words, could name and count several objects, understood the concept of 'none', asked and learned about his own color, made a Portmanteau - calling a red apple a banerry (banana + cherry) and even learned to spell while Dr. Peppenberg was only preparing him to do learn that! Alex is often described to be particularly smart, but he really wasn't, some parrots that were brought into the project later did actually better than him, which might be because the researchers knew better how to teach the parrots and not to underestimate them. When he died in 2007 at the age of 31 Dr. Irene Pepperberg asserted that his cognitive intelligence and grasp of language was on par with a human 5-year-old (but his emotional intelligence with a 2-year-old).
• Inspired by the above, Dalton and Tori have been raising and teaching their own African Grey named Apollo. (You can see the video records of his learning here.) He can identify colors, materials, objects, Shrek and Wario, and even give instructions of his own.

---