A wildlife park in Lincolnshire had a problem that started as a joke and stopped being funny. Its answer was the riskiest option on the table — and the birds’ welfare is the reason it went ahead anyway.
A Warning On The Fence
Most wildlife parks put up signs about feeding the animals. Lincolnshire Wildlife Park had to put up one about language.
A disclaimer notice went up on a parrot enclosure, warning visitors of a sensitive nature about what they were walking towards. The birds behind it were African greys, and they had learned words the park could not unteach them.
It had begun in 2020, when five of them were pulled off public display entirely. That story went around the world, and most people assumed it ended there.
It did not. Four years later the park was facing a version of the same problem that was considerably harder to contain.
The Original Five
The first group had names: Billy, Tyson, Eric, Jade and Elsie. Between them they had built a vocabulary that staff decided visitors should not be subjected to without warning.
They were removed from display and spent three months apart from the public. The hope was that time and distance would quiet things down.
When they came back, something unexpected had happened. Far from being a liability, they had become the park’s star attraction, according to chief executive Steve Nichols.
People came specifically to be sworn at. And that, it turned out, was the beginning of the real problem.
Visitors Made It Worse
Nichols was frank about what happens around the enclosure. Visitors gather and swear at the birds deliberately, trying to get them to copy it back.
African greys are among the most capable vocal mimics kept in captivity, which is exactly what makes them such compelling talkers and such difficult secret-keepers. A bird that can reproduce a microwave beep can reproduce anything a crowd shouts at it.
He was clear that the humour was part of the appeal, saying you never tire of being told to clear off by a parrot. But an audience actively coaching the behaviour is not a problem that solves itself.
And the flock was listening.
Then Three More Started
Three further parrots began swearing: another bird also called Eric, plus Captain and Sheila. That took the total to eight.
This is the moment the maths changed. Five birds is a novelty act you can isolate; a spreading vocabulary inside a large flock is something else.
The park keeps around 92 other parrots that do not swear. Every week the eight stayed separate was a week the situation could tip either way.
Nichols needed a decision. The one he made would have horrified most people running a visitor attraction.
The Decision Nobody Expected
He decided to put the eight swearers into the main flock. Not isolate them further — release them among the 92.
The reasoning was not about visitors at all. Speaking to the BBC in January 2024, Nichols pointed out that parrots are flock creatures and that the bigger the flock, the happier they are.
Then he said the line that settles it: even though they swear, the welfare of the birds has to come first.
That is a genuinely unusual order of priorities for an attraction whose most popular exhibit was the swearing. It is also the correct one, and it rests on something every parrot owner eventually runs into — the question of whether a parrot should ever be kept on its own.
What Could Go Wrong
The plan was dilution. Drop eight swearing birds into a flock of 92 and the swearing becomes a smaller fraction of the total noise.
The obvious risk runs the other way. Mimicry does not care which direction it travels, and 92 birds learning from eight is just as plausible as eight learning from 92.
Nichols said it out loud rather than pretending otherwise: the park could end up with 100 swearing parrots on its hands.
He also conceded the eight were unlikely to stop entirely, noting that once a word is in a parrot’s vocabulary it is usually there for good.
The Reversing Lorry Gambit
So what was the actual mechanism supposed to be? Not silence — competition.
The park has about 30 birds that reproduce the beeping of a reversing lorry. Nichols hoped the rest of the flock would pick up sounds like that one, so the swearing became a smaller share of what any individual bird was copying.
He also made a point that surprises people who have never kept one: parrots are widely assumed to be loud, but they often talk fairly quietly. His hope was that the swearing would simply be drowned out by the general noise of a large flock.
Anyone who has lived with a parrot that has locked onto one specific sound will recognise the strategy. Giving a bird something better to copy works far more reliably than trying to make it stop, which is the same principle behind the routine that calms a bird that screams at the same time every evening.
Why The Birds Won
Strip out the comedy and what is left is a welfare decision made against commercial interest. The park’s biggest draw was eight birds in a separate enclosure, and it chose to dissolve that draw into a flock.
Nichols has spent 35 years around parrots, and the judgement reflects it. A socially isolated African grey is a bird under pressure, however entertaining it is to the people watching.
Whether the flock diluted the swearing or the swearing conquered the flock, Nichols was honest that only time would tell. The park did not know the outcome when it made the call — that is what made it a bet.
What it did know was which way to err. If you keep a grey yourself and want to read your own bird better before the next round of copied noises starts, begin with what a raised crest and a shifting posture are actually telling you.
Source: BBC News, reported by Kevin Shoesmith, 22 January 2024. More about the park at Lincolnshire Wildlife Park.