Tears as Smart Bird Uses Words to Describe Grief for Dead Friend—’Feel Sad’

A bird’s way of telling her owner that she misses her friend has broken hearts online.

Ellie, an 11-year-old Goffin cockatoo, used her skills with a speech board to tell her owner Jennifer Cunha just how much she missed her friend Lily.

In a video that has received 2 million views, Ellie told her owner that she was feeling sad and even asked for medicine for an “ouch.” “Lily was a parrotlet that I had before Ellie came home with me, so Ellie knew her almost her whole life,” Cunha told Newsweek.

Ellie isn’t the first bird who has gone viral for her communication skills, from the bird that insists it’s a chicken to a European starling that sings along to the Harry Potter theme tune. But Ellie’s communication is a little more practiced. Cunha taught her to use the speech board around seven years ago to make her happier.

When Ellie started to use it to talk about Lily, her owner was taken aback. “It broke my heart,” said Cunha. “Lily passed nearly three years ago. Ellie frequently presses the ‘talk about feelings’ and ‘look at pictures’ buttons, so we looked at Lily’s picture and brought up her feelings menu so she could talk about her.”

Although the two birds didn’t interact a great deal, they always knew each other. Cunha said: “Ellie seemed to like to tease Lily by coming close to her, then Lily would chase her away—like a game. Lily and Ellie were always out and about with us.”

Learning to Communicate

“Ellie had a lot of behavior problems prior to learning vocabulary and communication— screaming, biting, repetitive movements,” said Cunha. “We started teaching her communication, phonics and tablet games to introduce more choice into her world and try to make her happier.”

Giving the bird a new form of communication seemed to be the perfect solution. Ellie started to communicate more. Cunha partnered with Dr. Carlie Rhoads from Western Oregon University to analyze the bird’s use of the speech board.

After lots of practice and training, Ellie’s results were incredible. Her corroboration rate of engagement with request and consistency in request was 94 percent across 82 different trials. Before this, though, Ellie had mainly focused on answering questions and simple communications, but the feelings section of the board was a different thing entirely.

“Feelings was a very complex lesson and took me a lot of trial and error—and a few months—to figure out,” Cunha said. “For us, feelings are observable behavior repertoires, and ‘feelings’ really can vary even from person to person. How do you label it, when it can be so subjective even for people? We don’t know enough on feelings for people, let alone for animals.”

Now Ellie has between 200 and 250 available buttons on her speech board. Her ‘talks’ and learning journey are not only the subject of many studies into bird communication but have also gained her many fans online.

In using the speech board to talk about her feelings, Ellie is also helping her owner come to terms with the loss of Lily.

“Lily died during the COVID-19 pandemic, and everything was so stressful, I just shoved the sadness away. I think Ellie’s grief conversations have helped me to revisit my grief in a gentle way,” Cunha said. “I feel awful that it took nearly three years to give her the words to share her grief with me. I’m reading a lot on child grief processing and trying to apply it to her, and being gentle with myself as I grieve too, now, with her.”

Thanks to the success of her videos, Cunha has even opened a school with her partner, Joe Zalman, so that birds around the world can learn to communicate just like Ellie. Parrot Kindergarten is working with more than 200 bird owners to help them learn to communicate and play on the tablet.

“They get weekly coaching, behavior workshops and lots of support for their birds,” said Cunha, who hopes that wider communication with the animals can help others.

“Learning to communicate helped Ellie build trust and improve the really hard behavior challenges. I want other birds to access this connection and learning, too,” she added.

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