‘Shut up, Queenie!” was something you would have regularly heard me bellow, had you happened to be in the vicinity of my living room in the late 1980s. It’s not that our pet budgerigar’s uncanny imitations of household sounds weren’t utterly delightful: the trill of our rotary dial telephone, the dog barking, my sister and I calling our mum in moany, demanding tones. It’s just that Queenie neither knew, nor cared, that you were trying to watch Neighbours or concentrate on a crucial Monopoly tactic.
Queenie was a girl, we were told when we bought her, because the nostril area above the beak, called the cere, was pale pink. But after a year or so, this went blue, which meant she was a boy. This only added to her magic.
