The reunion was brought about by a Southern California veterinarian who mistook Nigel, an African gray parrot, for her own missing bird, the Daily Breeze reported on Sunday.
Teresa Micco tracked Nigel’s microchip to Darren Chick, of Great Britain.
“I introduced myself and said, ‘Have you lost a bird?”’ Micco told the newspaper. “He initially said, ‘No.’ But he thought I meant recently.”
When she verified Chick’s name and said she had his African gray parrot, “He looked at me like I was crazy.”
He said his bird went missing four years earlier.
Little is known about Nigel’s whereabouts the past four years, but Chick said the bird’s British accent was gone, and it now chattered in Spanish.
Chick said last week’s reunion brought tears of joy to his eyes—despite the fact that Nigel bit him when he first tried to pick him up.
Micco said the behavior was not unusual and that Nigel would settle back in soon enough.
“He’s doing perfect,” Chick told the newspaper by the week’s end. “It’s really weird. I knew it was him from the minute I saw him.”
It’s the fifth parrot reunion facilitated by Micco, who has been running ads for her own missing bird for nine months. That parrot, Benjamin, flew the coop in February when it darted out a door that was left open.
Julissa Sperling found Nigel outside her home and brought him to Micco after seeing one of her ads.
But first, she took Nigel to her dog-grooming business.
“He was the happiest bird. He was singing and talking without control,” Sperling said. “He was barking like the dogs. I’m from Panama and he was saying, ‘What happened?’ in Spanish.”
Originally posted: 3:25 am | Tuesday, October 14th, 2014