- Hey, girlie, this video is all about you.
Did you see the treats I brought over here?
No, you aren't supposed to see them.
Those are to surprise you if you're awesome.
(upbeat keyboard music)
Hey, everybody, Jamie Leigh here from Bird Tricks,
and I wanted to do a Q&A with my Congo African Grey, Cressi.
You guys had a ton of questions about her,
and I know African Greys in general
are pretty popular among pet owners.
It's actually why I wanted to get an African Grey
is I wanted to see what the fuss was about.
Everybody wanted an African Grey,
and I just thought they're the one type of parrot
that really isn't that colorful
that people just go crazy over.
And I just thought why?
I want to find out.
The year we got Cressi Dave was on a business trip
in Las Vegas, and he came across
a pet store slash used battery shop
and saw Cressi there in a really small cage.
It was very unclean.
And he asked if her wings were clipped,
because she was at that fledging age
which is the natural age
where they would normally be learning to fly in the wild.
And the store owner said, "Uh, I meant to do it yesterday,
"but I haven't gotten around to it,
so she's still fully flighted."
And Dave was like, "I will take her."
We brought her home, we got her initial medical check,
and she had a couple really funky diseases
from just being in that gross place.
So we got her all cleaned up,
and she was our first free-flight trained bird
which was so, so special.
Another reason that we chose the African Grey
to do free-flight with was because it's what everybody
at the time was saying is the hardest species
to free-flight train,
so we thought if we can do it with an African Grey,
we could probably do it successfully
with the rest of our flock,
so this was kind of our test
and it's been an amazing, amazing journey.
(bird squawking)
- This is Cressi's first official day
to outdoor free-flight.
We're here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada
where we found a pretty big empty lot,
and we're gonna take her and work her free flight.
(bird squawking)
- [Jamie Leigh] All right, Cressi, come here.
Give me your other foot.
(bird tweeting)
- [Dave] Hey, Cress, hey, Cressi,
come here!
(bird trilling)
- [Dave] All right!
- [Jamie Leigh] Wow.
First outdoor flight.
(bird trilling)
- [Dave] Good girl!
Whoa!
Wasn't the most graceful landing, but we'll take it.
- Cressi!
Cressi!
Hey!
Come here. (wings flapping)
Wow!
Good girl!
- [Dave] That was her second flight.
- [Jamie Leigh] Whoa!
A little high there, freaked me out.
(energetic rock music)
One of the first questions I got about Cressi
is how old is she,
and I do keep all of my birds' hatch dates
in the video description.
She is actually hatched on Halloween,
so her birthday or her hatch day
is really easy for us to remember,
and she was hatched in 2007, so she's gonna be 13 this year.
"Where did her name come from?"
So Cressi is actually the brand name of the scuba gear
and dive gear that Dave and I used at the time.
We lived on an island in the South Pacific called Saipan
where we were avid scuba divers
and Dave is an avid free diver.
And all of our gear was Cressi gear,
and we just thought that would be a great name
for a female bird, so we named her Cressi
and then shortly after we named Tusa,
Tusa because of the same reason.
What can she say?
Cressi is a lot more of a closet talker
than the rest of our birds,
so she can say quite a bit of things,
but it's mostly from learning from Bandit on how to speak.
She doesn't pick up stuff from--
Was that nerve-racking?
The blanket fell.
She doesn't pick up words as easily from human tones
and language as she does from bird's language and tones,
so she copies what Bandit used to say
which is "night-night," "Bandit-boy,"
"Wondi."
She tries to say "Cresserton-Messerton,"
but it sounds more like (talking like bird).
So she's working on it.
The only thing that she really says clearly
is "Cressi," which is her name.
Do you feel like talking right now?
You don't seem like you feel like doing anything.
What's your name? - [Bird] Cressi.
- Good!
Good girl!
So I don't know if you guys can understand it that well.
That is one thing that she's very not African Grey
on is her voice.
Hey guys, so I'm backstage,
but I'm going to show you that Cressi
knows how to give a kiss now
which she learned from listening to Bandit.
Can I have a kiss?
Cressi, can I have a kiss?
(bird kissing)
Good girl!
- [Bird] Hey, Gregor.
Hey, Wondi.
I wuv you.
Hey, Gregor.
Hey, Wondi.
Baby.
- "At what age did Cressi hit puberty,
and how did it affect her personality?"
So, we were floored by this, but at one year of age,
mmmm, Cressi started showing hormonal signs,
and we thought, "This is way too early, what's going on?"
And it all happened because we thought
it would be really funny to train one of our birds
to lift its leg up on a fire hydrant.
Do you need to do something?
Do you want to go on the stand?
There you go.
Wasn't sure if she was going to poop on me.
But it kind of felt like it was going that way.
So anyways we thought it would be really funny
to train a bird to lift its leg up on one
of those little fire hydrants
that they have the dog poop bags come out of,
and when we went to train Cressi to do it,
she simply went to town on that fire hydrant.
So we were a little surprised and decided to teach Bondi.
(funny music)
Oh, you did have to go.
Good call, good call.
If you want to come back over here, you can.
Do you wanna come back since you already pooped?
There's a treat over here for you!
Chesserton-Messerton.
(wings flapping)
Good girl.
Okay, she's back.
"How is Cressi's hormonal behavior
different than other species?"
I find a lot less of her trying
to push her butt up against us.
I see that a lot more in the Macaws than I do with Cressi,
in particular, so that's nice, however,
she is our most easily hormonally triggered bird,
so just being on a perch or training or anything
it's really hard to snap her out of it,
and she'll just immediately do the heavy breathing,
droopy wings, and shortly after go to town.
I don't know how many of you guys
saw me do a video on our scale.
Just how many edits I had to make on that
because she kept getting horny on the scale itself
was so agitating (laughs) that day.
It was impossible to get a 30-second take of you
not loving that scale way too much.
"Why doesn't she free-fly as much as the other birds?"
So Cressi, because of her coloration,
she's really hard to spot in the sky,
because of her size and coloration, I should say.
The Sun Conures, even though you lose sight of them,
they're really noisy and they're really bright,
so when they do come into focus
you can see them a lot more easily.
Cressi flies kind of like a bullet.
She flies really fast and she's just kind of harder
to keep track of, so when we tend to fly her,
we tend to tell our entire group,
"Hey, we're gonna fly Cressi,"
so that we can have more eyes on her
and just have a better idea of where she's at.
There's been times where I've been walking in the direction
that I think she is, and she's come
and like hit me from behind and landed on my back
and I've just been shocked.
So she's a lot harder to just see out there,
and therefore a little bit more high-risk,
because we always want to have eyes on our birds
when we're free-flying them,
we don't want to lose sight of them for very long,
and we want to know where we lost sight of them
if that ever happens.
So we're just a lot more picky about where we fly her,
also she's just not as agile of a flier
as some of our other birds,
and because of her size we just take more care
and are more particular about where and when we fly her.
But she does love flying with the Macaws
that's how she was actually raised to free-fly
was among Macaws, so she has a great time
and she's a great little flyer.
We're just, we're really picky.
Also, the other side of that is that a lot of the times
when we're traveling we're usually taking whichever birds
are in that tour at the time,
and if birds aren't in the tour exclusively,
I don't always bring them on those trips.
So sometimes we might be on tour for a couple months
and that includes a free-flight trip in there,
and it's just the birds that are in the show
that are also going on the flight trip,
so it really depends on what our schedule looks like.
"What tricks does she know?"
She knows how to wave, spin,
hang upside down like a bat,
say her name, fly through a hula-hoop,
trying to think of what else.
She does like a whole series of routines in our magic show,
there's one called "Cressi Card Trick"
where she does a card trick with a kid.
She does what's called a...
"Ringer."
She, yeah, she does quite a few things.
She knows quite a few things.
You're a skilled little bug.
You are.
Cressi!
"What's her favorite treat?"
You guys, if you don't know by now,
just based on her merch tag-line (laughs),
"Good food, good mood," Cressi is total foodie.
She's not particular about anything.
She will take the treat.
Have treat, she will take it.
Doesn't matter what it is, she will eat it.
She's our least picky treat-eater, food-eater,
anything food, edible, yes, for Cressi.
"Why is she so messy?"
I would have to say I have no freaking clue
why you're so messy.
But one of the things that she does,
and when we were performing on cruise ships,
I had to line the walls with butcher paper
and just tape it up, because she takes our pellets,
and since they crumble so easily,
she literally mixes half of her water
with half of her pellets
and then the other half of her pellets
with half of her water and she makes this glop,
and she eats it, but she flings it
and she wipes her face around and it's everywhere,
it's all over the aviaries.
I mean it looks like I've left the aviaries
unclean for days after a single day of her having pellets.
It's just a total catastrophe.
Why are you so messy?
Probably just because she really loves food.
(happy guitar music)
(person whistling with music)
"What is her secret to always be so calm?"
I don't know, why are you so calm?
She is ridiculously calm.
There is very little that gets her in a ruckus.
I mean...
This is Cressi.
This is Cressi in the morning,
this is Cressi in the afternoon,
this is Cressi in the evening.
That's what she is when she's not eating.
You're a psycho, you're nuts, you're super high-energy.
Just kidding.
(funny rock music)
"How did you not take it personally
when she chose Dave as her person?"
Ummm...
(upbeat whistling music)