He does say ‘Lovely lovebirds’ quite a lot, which veers between a very sweet voice and being slightly sinister.
I think he’s saying things in order too. In the morning, I feed millie, pixie and horace and call their names in that order. Horace is always last as I feed him by hand, and I’ve noticed the last couple of mornings, I’ve had a little echo as I say Horace’s name.
We intend to teach him how to count, but I think that comes later, at the moment he is still developing his mimicking skills.
Ludvig has also had us both worried by his coughing, he appeared to be going into long fits of coughing – and then we realized that I’ve actually had a bit of a cough and he’s copying that. I hope he stops that though, as it does sound worrying. We’d both independently googled ‘coughing parrot’ finding that this was quite a common concern with owners of talking parrots – when they hear their parrot mimic a cough for the first time.
But although Ludvig looks like he’s going to be a talker, I don’t think he’s going to be a dancer. Cockatoos are very dancey – but African Greys are more gentle head-nodders than dancers.
Apparently some parrots love to dance and bounce around to music – surely something they don’t do in the wild, but parrots and many other birds do have a sense of rhythm. They will match their actions to a beat even when it changes. There must be a reason for it in nature…
This video sums it up pretty well – the white fluffy thing is a baby cockatoo, dancing all over the place, and the Ludvig-alike is an African Grey – totally ignoring the dancing cockatoo! I think that would be Ludvig’s reaction too if he were to see a bouncing baby parrot.