In Moscow, parrot eats telephone cables on the sly for 2 months

A parrot owned by a Moscow family was about to bid farewell to its own life on account of the gastronomical fondness that the bird developed for a rather unusual "delicacy." A three-year-old African Grey Parrot, named as Karlusha, was eating telephone cable wires without its owners' knowledge for two months. The digestion of wire pieces in the parrot's stomach resulted in a very strong intoxication of the bird's organism.

Ornithologist Valery Kozlitin, who examined Karlusha in a Moscow vet clinic, said that the owners brought the bird to the clinic and said that it had lost appetite and became unusually dull. Doctors X-rayed the parrot's tiny stomach and saw that it was all filled with pieces of wire. As it turned out later, Karlusha had fallen into the habit of picking a telephone cable. The cable was fixed to a wall very close to its cage. The parrot managed to eat the wire on the sly, for nobody was using the phone. The copper wire started oxidizing in the bird's stomach, which eventually intoxicated the "gourmet."

The vets tried to remove the ball of wire from the stomach with the help of liquid paraffin, but the attempt failed. After that the doctors decided to perform an operation on the bird. A small pressed wire-ball, about 1 cm in diameter, was removed from Karlusha's stomach as a result of the operation. The parrot ate about one gram of copper. Doctors said that it was the first occurrence in their practice, when they had to remove a foreign body from the parrot's stomach.