An African gray parrot that went missing for four years surprised its British owner upon its return, after the owner found the bird was now speaking in Spanish.
In 2010, Darren Chick, a British man living in Torrance, southern California, lost track of his parrot, Nigel. The animal, which inherited a distinct British accent from mimicking his speech, did not return for several years, and eventually he assumed that he would not be reunited with his long-lost pet.
Four years later, the owners of Happy Tails Dog Spa in Torrance found an African gray parrot and began searching for its owner. This wasn't quite as easy as they were anticipating. Another parrot owner, veterinarian Teresa Micco, had been putting up posters in the hope of finding her own missing pet, and the Happy Tails Dog Spa owners attempted to return the parrot to her.
Though the bird looked like Micco's lost pet Benjamin, when the vet checked its microchip, she found that it was not her bird. The microchip, which the Daily Breeze reports was actually placed in the bird by Micco in 2006, had not been registered. However, a paper trail led the rag-tag team of missing bird investigators to a pet store named Animal Lovers in Torrance.
This story is actually somewhat a triumph of paperwork filing, as the pet store had, to the surprise of everyone, kept old paper records of the bird's band number attached to its leg. Micco attempted to ring the numbers that were listed for the owners, but there was no luck, as the bird had been lost a lot further in the past than anyone involved realized.
"So I showed up at his house and knocked on the door," Micco told the Daily Breeze. "I introduced myself and said, 'Have you lost a bird?'
"He initially said 'No' — but he thought I meant recently."
Chick eventually realized that the bird they were talking about, now equipped with Spanish phrases, was the parrot that he had lost a full four years prior. The moment he saw the bird, he knew he had found his old pet.
While he was happy to be reunited with his pet, and Nigel settled back in pretty quickly, that wasn't the end of the story. Living nearby, the Hernandez-Smith family saw an article about the parrot, and could explain its whereabouts in its four missing years, and its proficiency in Spanish.
Ruben Hernandez, 86, a Spanish speaker from Guatemala, had been looking after the bird at his multi-generational family home, and it was from him and his family that the parrot had picked up his new skills.
"My grandma passed away about two years ago, and he is one of the last mementos for my grandpa," Liza Smith, Hernandez's granddaughter, told the Daily Breeze of the same parrot, which they had named "Morgan" after Captain Morgan rum.
"Morgan's loss has been hard on him. They have a very special bond. Our only request is to meet up with the owner for closure. We also are willing to donate his cage, food and toys we have for him."
When Smith showed up to see Morgan/Nigel, Chick decided that the best thing to do was to return the bird to its home of the past four years.