When I was working as a police officer in a medium sized town outside of Denver we got calls all the time about noisy dogs: either barking or whining or both.

One summer afternoon I got dispatched to a noise complaint. No it wasn’t a dog it was a bird. A Macaw parrot to be exact. The complainant advised dispatch that the owner had built a bird run on the patio and let the bird outside when she, the owner, went to work, and that the bird was very noisy. I have had birds before and I know how noisy they can get.

I finally arrived at the address of the noisy bird. At first I didn't hear anything but as I walked around to the back, which was also connected to an alley, I could hear a bird squawking. And yes, it was loud. I attempted to contact the owner, but one of the neighbors said the owner was at work. I could understand why the neighbors would be upset. All the while I was visiting with the neighbor the bird kept squawking. It was very loud; it even started tuning up the neighborhood dogs.

I began talking to the neighbor about the bird and told him there isn't much I can do about an overly loud bird. When I went to the house, the bird was inside and was pretty loud. The neighbor/complainant said, " It isn’t so much the loud squawking that bothers me it is the swearing and cussing by the bird." I was informed by several neighbors that the bird swore like a drunken sailor. I heard the bird saying something inside the house, but didn’t quite make out what it was saying. I am sure it was cussing out the neighbors for complaining on him or her since, according to all the neighbors, the only words the bird did know were swear words. I turned the matter over to an Animal Control officer and he, too, scratched his head and didn’t know how to handle a cussing bird. There are no laws for disturbing the peace by bird.

This is the tale about a parakeet named Hector Pector. He came to our home one Christmas while I was finishing graduate school. A cute green and yellow parakeet, Hector Pector added beautiful music in our home. As we moved from college on to my first post-school job, Hector Pector of course came with us. We had settled in a condo and life was looking great.

One day, while I was visiting some friends in the complex, I received a frantic call from my wife. I rushed home to find her in tears and poor Hector Pector dead on a clean floor of his cage. My wife had been cleaning his cage, using the vacuum cleaner to clean up the mess on the bottom. All of the sudden there was a sickening "thump" sound as the bird was sucked into the vacuum hose. (Well, that is the story that I like to tell. Actually, what really happened was that the sound and vacuum hose were too much for Hector Pector, who became so agitated that he flew frantically around until he had broken his neck against the side of the cage.) In any event, that was the end of our cute green and yellow parakeet, poor Hector Pector.

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