Austin the Parrotlet

This post features all the photos that I could find of my cute and talkative little parrotlet that I named Austin after Austin Powers (I bought him and the movie on DVD the same day on Thanksgiving weekend in November of 1999.) He sadly passed away suddenly in the summer of 2011. I also have a short film clip of him mimicking a Star Trek Tribble and a long audio clip of him talking through his massive vocabulary. I’ll be posting both on this blog as soon as I am able to get them processed and online. There are more photos I have of him, a lot more I think, but they are all on floppy disk so it will take some time to recover them all.

His voice could be hard to understand at first, due to its pitch, but once you understood what he was saying… you’d probably burst out laughing. He knew several cute words and phrases like “you my buddy?” which was the first phrase he ever learned. Later he started saying “Austin’s a pretty bird” quite often because he knew what it meant, and he was damned proud of himself. He also knew other kinds of words and phrases. He went through a biting phase and during that time he picked up all sorts of “colorful metaphors”. Austin would even take different words he had picked up and combine them into brand new phrases he’d never heard before like “Austin’s a pretty bastard” which is a combination of the aforementioned “Austin’s a pretty bird” and what he would always call my dad whenever he’d walk into the room ever since he once knocked over Austin’s cage which was “dirty old bastard”. I could go on! His vocabulary was just so extensive and impressive. It breaks my heart to think of how he’s gone now except for these photos and some scratchy recordings.