When Nigel vanished four years ago, he spoke with a cultivated British accent.
Little is known about where the African grey parrot went, what he did — or who he was with — in those missing years. But when he was reunited with his owner, Darren Chick, in Torrance last week, the British accent was gone and the bird was chattering in Spanish, often mentioning the name “Larry.”
The happy reunion began to unfold after veterinarian Teresa Micco — who had been running ads for her own lost African grey parrot, Benjamin — was contacted by the owners of Happy Tails Dog Spa in Torrance, who said they thought they’d found her missing bird at their Torrance home.
“I heard somebody whistling and saying, ‘Hello? Hello?’ ” said Julissa Sperling, who owns Happy Tails with her husband, Jonathan, and was at home when the queries brought her to the door. “I opened the door and went out — nothing.”
When it happened again, she took a closer look and spotted the parrot.
“I own a dog-grooming business so we put him in a little cage and brought him with us to the store,” she said. “He was the happiest bird. He was singing and talking without control. … He was barking like the dogs. I’m from Panama and he was saying, ‘What happened?’ in Spanish.”
Delighted by the bird’s verbal mimicry, she was getting attached quickly. But she knew he must belong to someone, so the couple began looking on the Internet for a possible owner. They spotted Micco’s ad for her missing bird and thought it might be a match.
While Nigel looked a lot like Micco’s Benjamin — including the distinctive yellow eyes and red tail — Micco used a scanner to check for a microchip, which did not turn up her ownership information.
“I felt so sorry for her, her face changed totally when she found out it wasn’t hers,” Sperling said. “But then she said, ‘He’s microchipped so let’s find the owner.’ ”
That took some investigative work along with a lot of luck.
It turned out that no one had registered the microchip — which ironically Micco, then a vet tech, had put into the bird in 2006 — so paper sales records were traced to Animal Lovers pet store in Torrance. Surprisingly, the shop kept its old paper records and made note of the band number that was originally on the bird’s leg.
“We both kept records and we had jotted the band number on our sales slip” when the bird was sold, said Tomi Takemoto of Animal Lovers.
When Micco called the two phone numbers listed for the owner, both were no longer good.
“So I showed up at his house and knocked on the door,” Micco said. “I introduced myself and said, ‘Have you lost a bird?’
“He initially said ‘No’ — but he thought I meant recently.”
When she verified Chick’s name and said she had his African grey parrot, “He looked at me like I was crazy.”
He said his bird went missing four years earlier.
“Luckily, the owner never moved so everything just came together,” Takemoto said, recalling that she’d hand-fed Nigel as a chick and that the bird talked “just like” his British owner soon after he’d bought it.
Last week’s reunion brought tears of joy to Chick’s eyes. But it didn’t go as smoothly as it could have. Nigel initially bit Chick when he tried to pick him up.
Micco said the behavior was not unusual and that Nigel would settle back in soon enough.
“He’s doing perfect,” Chick said by the end of the week. “It’s really weird, I knew it was him from minute I saw him.”
Thanks to the long-running personal ads for her own missing bird of nine months, this was the fifth African Grey reunion facilitated by Micco, who lives in Redondo Beach and is an associate veterinarian at Pointe Vicente Animal Hospital in Rancho Palos Verdes. Her own bird flew the coop in February when he darted out a door left open a bit too long.
Micco believes he’s been spotted a couple times — one report put the bird near the Point Vicente Lighthouse (and near their old home); another sighting had what she believes was Benjamin perched on an overhead wire on Gaffey Street near the 110 Freeway in San Pedro.
Benjamin, a 19-year-old pet she’d raised since he was 3 weeks old, is also microchipped. The birds usually live anywhere from 18 to 30 years, sometimes as long as 50 years.
Many captive birds that get out will eventually seek out people, Micco said.
“A captive bird is not accustomed to being out of a cage of a home, they don’t know how to survive,” Micco said. “When they land in trees, they don’t see any food bowls.”
African grey parrots, which have been traded on the international market and are considered vulnerable, are commonly kept for companionship and can closely mimic human speech, making them popular pets.
Micco said Benjamin’s voice sounded so much like hers that it fooled her future husband before they were married.
“It’s kind of eerie. We were dating and he thought I was in the kitchen when he called out, ‘Bring me an ice tea.’ ”
“OK,” came the reply.
When Micco walked through the living room where her fiance was sitting a few minutes later, he asked where his ice tea was.
It was the bird, not Micco, who had called out the answer from the kitchen.
Benjamin also responds well to his favorite song taught to him by Micco, “I Love You a Bushel and a Peck,” always lighting on her finger when they’d sing it.
She’s hopeful her bird will find his way home soon.
“In my pursuit to find him, I’ve recovered five other lost African greys,” she said. “So hopefully, that karma is going to come back.”
