Talking Parrot Missing for Four Years Returns…Speaking Spanish

An African grey parrot that went missing four years ago was reunited with its owner Saturday. But as it turns out, a lot can change in nearly half a decade.

When veterinarian Teresa Micco posted ads for her lost parrot, she was contacted by Happy Tails Dog Spa in Torrance, California, telling her they thought they'd found her missing bird, the Daily Breeze reported. It had yellow eyes and a red tail just like her bird, but when Micco scanned it for a microchip, it didn't match her information.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

The found bird's real owner never registered the installed microchip, but as fate would have it, Micco had been the one to install the bird's microchip while working as a veterinary technician in 2006. By using a series of paper trails, Micco tracked down the store that had sold the bird and obtained the owner's address to try to track him down and return his pet.

“I introduced myself and said, ‘Have you lost a bird?" she said.

The man said his pet parrot, Nigel, had gone missing four years earlier. Micco verified the man's name, Darren Chick, and reunited him with the bird he hadn't seen in all that time.

That's when Chick, who is British, noticed something very different about Nigel: When the bird went missing, he spoke in a British accent. Now, he's fluent in Spanish.

It's not clear where Nigel was for four years or what he was doing — or how he learned another language.

Wherever he was, though, Chick told the newspaper Nigel is "doing perfect" now.

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Front page image via Shutterstock