A pet parrot got out through a door in a garage in the village of Torquay, Saskatchewan, on May 3. She turned up about a month later in Prince Albert, 500 kilometres (310 miles) to the north, caught by a woman who called the Saskatoon Parrot Rescue about her.
CBC News told the story in October 2025, with Rhys MacLean talking it through on CBC Radio’s The 306. The bird belongs to his mother. What the account never does is explain the middle, and that gap turns out to be the honest part of it.
A Door Held Open
Bleu is an Indian ringneck, the parrot also known as the rose-ringed parakeet. She lived in a house where her cage door was usually left open, and by MacLean’s account that had never once been a problem.
His mother is 75. She and MacLean’s stepfather had kept Bleu indoors without incident until May 3, when the stepfather walked in from the garage and the bird went the other way.
“She flew out the open door, did a couple of victory laps in the garage and then flew out the [other] door and we thought she was gone forever,” MacLean told Peter Mills, host of CBC Radio’s The 306.
Read that sequence again, because its shape is the useful part. Two doors, a few seconds, and a bird with enough air under her to use both.
The Sinking Feeling
“We all had that sinking feeling we were never going to find this bird,” MacLean said. What follows an escape like this one is not drama so much as a house full of people who all know there is nothing useful to do.
“My step-dad just felt terrible.… It was just an honest accident. [Bleu’s] never done that before or been anywhere close to that,” he said.
Part of what made it worse was that the house was still new to everyone in it. His mother and stepfather had moved to Torquay from Calgary in 2024, and MacLean believed the change of surroundings had changed the way the bird behaved.
Which is the argument for treating a settled bird as an unsettled one. A parrot that has never gone for a door is not a parrot that will not, and the five-minute check before any outside door opens is written for exactly the household where nothing has ever happened.
A Post Written For Closure
Torquay is a village. MacLean had no idea how to look for a parrot in the country around it, so he did the only thing available to him and wrote a post on the community lost and found page for Estevan, the nearest city.
He expected nothing from it. By his own account he had “zero optimism” that it would lead to finding out where the bird had gone.
“To be honest with you, I wrote the post as kind of like a closure thing because I didn’t know how else to be there for my mom or my step-dad. And I knew how bad they felt,” he said. He put jokes in it, to “lighten the mood”.
Worth being clear about what that was. It was not a search tactic and it worked anyway. The version that is a tactic starts with the search order that works in the first forty-eight hours, and a post like MacLean’s belongs inside that rather than in place of it.
Bird Sounds At 2:30 AM
People answered, and they kept answering at hours when nobody is thinking straight. Strangers stood outside in the dark in Estevan holding their phones up at the trees.
“People were really on the ball with that. I had people messaging me at 2:30 in the morning, recording sounds, bird sounds, in their backyard in Estevan, be like, ‘This sounds like a weird kind of exotic bird,'” MacLean said.
“So the people really pulled together and they were actually really keeping an eye out.”
None of it led anywhere, and MacLean named the reason himself. Bleu is very difficult to catch even in a closed space, so by the time he or his stepfather could drive to a confirmed sighting she would already be somewhere else. That distance between seeing a bird and holding one is why a reliable step-up is worth building in the years you do not need it.
Five Hundred Kilometres North
A month after the escape, a message came in that did not look like any of the others. A woman in Prince Albert had caught a blue parrot and had told the Saskatoon Parrot Rescue about it.
Prince Albert sits in north-central Saskatchewan. Torquay is in the south of it, 165 kilometres (103 miles) southeast of Regina, and the two places are about 500 kilometres apart.
MacLean’s word for the news was “quite shocking”, which is hard to improve on. A bird whose cage door stood open in a quiet house had crossed most of a province.
How she did it is not on the record. The report does not say what route she took, what she found to eat, or whether anybody saw her in between, and it is better to leave that blank than to fill it in.
Bringing Kiwi Along
There was still the question of whether the parrot in Prince Albert was Bleu. A blue parrot in a stranger’s hands is not by itself an answer, and the family were most of a province away from it.
So MacLean’s stepfather took the one thing that could settle it. He brought Kiwi, Bleu’s cage-mate, along to meet the captured bird.
The report says only that the parrot was indeed identified as Bleu. It does not describe the meeting and it carries no quote about it, which leaves the most cinematic moment in the whole story as the one nobody wrote down.
What settled it, in the end, was another bird. That is worth keeping if you have two of them, because the second bird in the cage turns out not to be only company.
Like A Military Tour
Bleu came home after about a month outdoors, and she came home in poor shape. MacLean’s description of her softens nothing.
“She came home looking like she’d just done a military tour: skinny, sun-bleached, a little shell-shocked,” he said.
Skinny is fixable on two weeks of good food. The sun-bleaching is not, because a bird only gets new feathers when it molts, and how long a parrot takes to replace a worn set of feathers is counted in weeks and months rather than days.
“But within weeks, she was back to her usual sassy self, eating like every meal was her last, and goofing with Kiwi again,” MacLean said. That last clause closes the loop, because the bird who identified her is the bird she went back to.
What is left of this story is one number and one blank. The number is 500 kilometres, covered inside a month by a parrot that had spent its life in a house. The blank is everything about how, and the family have never pretended otherwise.
Birds that come back do not always come back the same. A budgie that spent eleven weeks loose in a Winnipeg winter arrived indoors unable to eat from a full dish without a flock to cue him. Bleu had Kiwi waiting for her.
MacLean wrote his Facebook post to close the thing off for his mother. It reopened it instead.
Source: CBC News, Escaped parrot that left family aflutter found 500 km from south Sask. home, posted 4 October 2025, with Rhys MacLean speaking to Peter Mills on CBC Radio’s The 306. That report dates the escape to May 3 but gives no year, so no year is stated here. Global News also covered the story. Photographs of Bleu, of Kiwi and of the MacLean family belong to CBC or were submitted by Rhys MacLean, and none of them are reproduced here. The featured photograph at the top of this page is a different blue rose-ringed parakeet, by Lauren Tibert Wells via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. The real photographs on this page all show other rose-ringed parakeets and the illustrations show nothing real at all, as noted under each one.