For more than 170 years the budgerigar has been a feathered friend in times of war, pain and pestilence. The budgerigar’s sweet chirping has been a source of comfort and hope for those that have these colourful, loyal parrots in their lives.
Dogs and cats might be the most widely owned pets but when it comes to birds, the budgerigar rules the roost.
As someone growing up in the aftermath of World War II, I’m reminded that the ubiquitous budgie helped keep Londoners sane during the blitz. And now I feel certain that the budgerigar is playing its part in a different “war”, bringing comfort to those isolated at home during the fight against the Coronavirus pandemic engulfing the world.
The budgerigar’s place in human society is revealed in a new book devoted to Melopsittacus undulatus, simply called Budgerigar, which among other fascinating facts describes how British Prime Minister Winston Churchill turned to a pet budgie called Toby in some of his darkest hours.
Although accounts of Toby’s war-time role are sketchy, Churchill certainly had his trusted friend at his side when he laid out Britain’s nuclear-weapons strategy during the Cold War.
Churchill’s defence minister, Harold Macmillan, described in his diaries how Toby perched on Churchill’s head “while sonorous sentences were rolling out of the maestro’s mouth on the most terrible and destructive engine of mass warfare yet known to mankind”.
Today, there are estimated to be five million budgerigars in captivity throughout the world and it is easy to see how these tiny parrots have captured people’s hearts.
As the book’s authors Sarah Harris and Don Baker state, budgerigars have flown into the human world not just because of their beauty and comic antics. They are remarkably intelligent and have secrets of survival that are still being plumbed by scientists.
It is noted, for instance, that when it rains in the outback budgerigars can arrive from hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres away. It poses questions about the bird’s remarkable powers of weather forecasting.
As creatures that are easily bred, rapidly maturing, remarkably obliging and capable of ongoing learning, budgies make excellent laboratory subjects and have been used in many studies related to hearing, vocal communication and learning as well as flight navigation.
Although the colourful budgerigar, flying in vast flocks that can blacken the sky, have been known to Aborigines for thousands of years, the species only achieved international fame when it was studied in north-western New South Wales by a pioneering British ornithologist, George Shaw, in 1805. And from the moment it was first bred in captivity in the 1850s, it went on to cement its place in history.
As a measure of its fame, it has been depicted on the postage stamps of more than 30 nations, from Antigua to Zambia. No other bird or animal has the same status – it’s a bird with an astonishing capacity to bring out tenderness and empathy in great and powerful men and women.
Budgerigar is published by Allen @ Unwin, priced $29.99.