Once upon a time, I lived in an area where multiple flocks of Double Yellow Heads roamed free and bred with reckless and gleeful abandon. These birds can be damn fine talkers. A prolific pecuniary partnership came to pass, for several years.
The yard where I lived had a very large walnut tree. When the nuts were ripe, it was not unusual to have 10-20 parrots cracking shells and jabbering away for several hours, maybe two or three times a week. Manually triggered minimum fuss traps were put to good use.
Because adult wild parrots could take as much as ten times the effort and time to finger-tame, as young ones, the flocks were eventually followed back to their home roosts and breeding grounds. Pre-flight youngsters were easier to catch and tame.
The girl I was dating was studying to be a veterinarian, and worked part time for a state agency. She could test a batch of 5 or so birds for Newcastle disease, for a very nominal fee.
This all was done during the time of a Newcastle scare, when no exotic birds could be legally brought into the USA.
A finger-tamed youngster could fetch $200 on a good day, adults, $150. If they were already talking, it jumped to $350 and $250.
At the time this was going on, grocery and liquor stores had end-of-aisle advertising displays that ran on batteries, and rotated or metronomed or slid side to side. Once the specific promotion was over, it was easy enough to get the store managers to hold onto the signs until knuckleheads like me came to pick them up. The signs helped to keep the parrots amused during their stay in cages. A bored parrot can become hazardous to its own health.
All them there bonah feedays are for nothing more than to lay the groundwork for relating my method to get a parrot talking as easy and soon and as much as possible.
Good cassette tape shells were at one time, screwed together. One could be taken apart, and a small loop of tape made that could be laced in a new pattern, to net about 15 seconds of continous play.
I think I may have had four or five modestly priced portable tape recorder/players set up at some point, that could also run on household AC. They were all plugged into those little timers that were intended to turn lights on and off.
Each recording was set to run for about 30 minutes, at specific times of the day. If you want the bird to greet you when you walk through the front door each evening, the odds will greatly improve if the poor bastard just got through listening to "What's for dinner, dumbass?"
I once used a freebie alarm/notification program that could be set at 1 minute intervals over a day, and up to a year, for when sitting in front of a computer. Window's Sound Recorder could be used to make one's own messages. There has got to be a good variety of methods to get the job done, without resorting to cassette tapes.
Quakers can be good talkers. If you want to maximize yours and other's amusement, it wouldn't take much extra effort. Have fun.
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