A barking cockatoo that says 'NO!'

from w
I am really averse to any kind of bird coming near me (since a childhood experience with turkeys I think) so wasn't happy when visiting my brother up at Swan Hill and being circled by a bird in the back yard. My brother has a sulphur-crested cockatoo that bailed me up at every opportunity. It has a cage but comes and goes at will and hangs around a locked door which it tries to open. If it gets inside it eats at the furniture, carpet, and wood. Well, I swore at it and told it to get lost and it squawked back at me 'No, no, no!' Then I heard it coughing and thought it was imitating my post-bronchial noises, but my brother insisted it was imitating a goggle-eyed little dog that comes and goes to the house. The cockatoo is quite crazy - barking, coughing, talking, rocking, dancing, chewing. It's about forty years old and was given to my brother 'to mind' several years ago. He treats it kindly and it follows him about in the back yard, but as for visitors like me, well, I'd like to turn it into a curry! I wouldn't waste a photo on it so I got a pic from google. I wanted to teach it to say rude words but Peceli prompted me to resist!

Of course when you see these sulphur-crested cockatoos in the wild as we did near Stawell on our drive back from Adelaide, that is a different story. Flocks of them were beside the road and looked lovely. I do not agree with putting birds in cages anyway. I suppose that 'Clyde' the cat, gets along with it somehow.