We first got her at 6 months old, after having visited with her in the bird store four separate times for a few hours each; we picked her because of her personality. Obviously very bright, and so sweetly affectionate…we fell in love with her immediately.

 Although cockatoos are not nearly as talkative as parrots are (they belong to the same family of birds), she has amazed us with her facility to quickly learn. Even more startling is her use of words and phrases only in appropriate situations, convincing us that she's not just mindlessly mimicking what she hears, but actually understands on a simple level what it means. Among her more endearing utterings:

"Hallo baby…" when I come in the door at night

"I love you baby" first thing in the morning and when put to bed at night

"Hallo" spoken with an upward inflection, only when the 'phone rings (just the way Muffin says it when answering the 'phone)

"Is Maria a good girl?" to my wife, first thing in the morning

"Mummy loves you" at various times in the day when we're close to her

"Bye-bye Baby, Mummy loves you" when my wife or I leave for the day

"NI-Night, Baby" when put to bed for the night

"Daddy loves you, Baby" when I'm around.

She has since added the following:

"I love you, baby" which is really remarkable to us, as we wondered if she knew the concept of "I"…

"You're my sweet little baby" and "Are you my pretty little girl?"…

She recently started full throated laughing, and now does it whenever we chuckle about something or another, particularly when watching television.

 It takes two years to tell the sex of these birds by eye colour, which is a bit long to be calling her "Hey you…", so we named her Churchill back when we (I) thought (hoped) she was a boy. The fall back plan had been to call her Thatcher if she was discovered to be a girl, however, by the time we knew for certain it was far too late to change…

Churchill is an extremely social bird, and loves to be handled and spoken to. Her favourite food is spinach, so she normally gets a fresh spinach leaf as a treat when we come home at night and move her from her cage out onto her tree perch. She eats when we eat, and will come over to the end of her tree to look at the television when we settle in to watch a bit of it. Once, when I sat on the floor in front of her cage to read a newspaper article, she climbed all the way down to the bottom of her cage, carefully tore off a strip of the newspaper we line it with each day, and then climbed back up to her perch and sat there on one leg, examining the strip of paper while I read the article. The moment I finished and put the paper away, she promptly dropped her little bit of paper and went back to playing with her other toys.

Churchill absolutely lives for grapes, the green, sweet California type when they are ripe. However, she's a bit picky: while she loves them, she doesn't seem to want to pick them up herself and eat them. Instead, she sucks us into holding them for her while she gently picks at the top until she works a bit of the skin loose. Then, she'll peel the skin off and eat that, before eating the rest of the grape. She loves the social contact of being hand fed by one or the other of us.

In the morning, she will daintily prepare what we call "Churchill's breakfast tray": she goes to the far end of her cage where her food and water bowls are, and takes up 3 or 4 food pellets in her mouth at one time. Then she'll carefully climb back to the other end of her cage and gently lay out each pellet in a row on one of the crossbars in front of her perch. As the crossbar is no bigger than the pellets themselves, this requires a bit of precision placement! After this, she sits quietly, nibbling on each pellet in turn until breakfast is done.

Churchill loves having her tummy rubbed, and absolutely lives for a face snuggle or cuddle. On being picked up she almost immediately raises a wing high to expose her sides for a gentle rubbing. She particularly likes having her back rubbed, so we've developed a special grip where she raises both wings high, and we slide our hand over her back: we can rub one side with our thumb, her back with our forefinger, and her other side with our remaining fingers.

Churchill doesn't get to sit on our shoulders very often; that's a special treat reserved for every so often when she's been particularly good. When she is there, she performs "aloe grooming" on us, that is, gently preening our hair just as she does for her own feathers, and nibbling on our ears. She has razor sharp eyesight, far better than ours, so she is well equipped to do "nit picking": she will gently grasp anything thing on our face, whether it is a micro tiny speck of food, or even a hair stubble missed in the morning shave…and she will remove it! Cleaning and grooming us is a very common social activity, and a strong sign of affection for cockatoos, so we're rather flattered by it.

The reason we don't let her on our shoulders too often is because we try to make a conscious effort to keep her slightly below our own eye level. This is because, psychologically, a bird who can routinely view you at eye level or higher quickly becomes cocky, perhaps less affectionate: as they feel less dependent upon you, and begin to feel more equal to you, it will show in their behaviour toward you. For this reason, her cage is specially arranged so that all the numerous branches and perches we've installed for her to play on will keep her below our eye level.

Churchill will normally take a little bird bath every other day or so in the wild. We got her used to showering with me at a very early age, so she now looks forward to her weekly appointment with her "hairdresser": she gets in the shower with me, gets thoroughly wet, and then I hand her back out to Maria, who blow dries her gently with a hair dryer set on low, and gentle heat. She absolutely lives for this, happily raising one wing, then the other as she maneuvers around to get the maximum effect.