An Okanagan woman rescued a lost starling and taught it to say ‘happy birthday Canada’ just in time for the country’s 150th birthday.
Cindy Hansen said she named the starling Nubert, but he calls himself Chicken. He was lost in her carport when she and her husband decided to take it inside their Vernon home.
Hansen started teaching the bird to wish her a happy birthday but then had an idea.
“I thought, I have to think a little more globally here, let’s teach him to say happy birthday Canada.”
It didn’t take long before Chicken understood.
“He caught on right away. We started in December and he caught on within two weeks,” she said.
“So we had to stop saying it because we thought, it’s a little early for Canada’s birthday. Let’s tone it down for a few months.”
Hansen and her husband also attempted to teach Chicken and another starling how to whistle the national anthem.
“We were whistling to them, too. We’re just bad whistlers. We got a cross between O’Canada and the X-Files music,” Hansen laughed.
She said she didn’t think she would get birds until she retired, but her husband ended up wanting these birds’ attention even more than she did.
“They’re very affectionate birds,” she explained. “They watch you talk and you can see that they’re learning.”
Watch in the Twitter video below as Global News reporter Kimberly Davidson hears the bird talk for herself:
This was the family’s second attempt at rescuing the birds, which are pests in the Okanagan, known for eating orchard fruits.
“When the first one and his brother (or sister) fell out, we did what we were supposed to do. We put them in a shoebox with a towel. Then we put them up high so the cats couldn’t get them,” Hansen explained.
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“The mother was supposed to come tend to them, but that didn’t happen and the first one died.”
She told her husband she couldn’t watch the sibling die, too, and brought him inside, researching what to feed him. She settled on a diet of mushed cat food and eggs.
“He thrived and I carried him around in a shoebox with me wherever I went for the first three weeks. I was like his mother.”
Hansen said raising starlings as pets happens more in the United States.
“It’s just not very common in Canada,” she explained. “They eat our fruit here.”
She noted her birds tend to prefer bugs, like ants, over fruit.
Hansen purchased a special cage for her starlings.
“They need a specific kind of cage because they’re very messy eaters. They kind of toss it around a bit.”
She said the birds are similar to her dogs–they even eat the same treats.
With files from Global’s Kimberly Davidson
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