This missing pet has a built-in alarm — but he hasn’t been heard from in a few days.
“We seem to think he’s saying Ricky, and we don’t know where he got that from because we don’t know any Ricky,” said Kayla Lussier, 27, whose parrot, Peppermint, went missing from her Woodlawn neighborhood home last week. “He makes kissing noises and stuff like that, too. He does scream very loud. We call it a car alarm.”
He also says “good boy.”
Peppermint is a green Indian ringneck parrot who also responds to Pep, Peppy and possibly bird calls. He has a silver band on his left leg.
“I have videos on my phone with his calls that he makes, and hopefully he’ll respond to them, but we haven’t been able to hear from him or see him anywhere,” Lussier said.
The unclipped bird took off flying when Lussier tried to sell him to a new owner because he didn’t play nice with her other parrot, Jasper. Lussier had owned Peppy, who would turn 2 in April, for more than a year, but she had owned Jasper, a 3 1/2-year-old turquoise parrot of the same breed, for nearly two years.
“I had him a lot longer, and he was being too aggressive towards him, and I don’t want him to get hurt,” she said.
Around 6:30 p.m. Sept. 24, the bird’s potential new owners, unable to fit his large cage into the back of their SUV, opened the bottom of the cage trying to make it fit, she said. That’s when Peppermint got away.
She was going to sell the bird and the cage for $350, “which is basically a steal.”
“I wasn’t compensated or anything for losing him,” she said.
Lussier last saw Peppermint the morning after he first flew away. After hearing from a neighbor that he spent the night in a tree, she went looking for him the morning of the 25th. She brought Jasper and a carrier in hopes Peppermint would hear Jasper calling and fly down to them.
“That’s when he flew off into a wooded area,” she said.
A few days ago, a neighbor heard him calling from a tree on Chadwick Road, a couple blocks from her McDonald Avenue home, so she is hopeful that he is still in the area.
“We’ve been searching every day,” she said. “Today we actually are trying to get some fliers made up to everyone in the area.”
She said Peppermint is “pretty friendly.”
“He’s usually skittish around strangers, but around this time, if he’s still alive, hopefully he’ll be looking for somebody to help him,” she said.
Anyone who sees or hears from Peppermint is encouraged to call Lussier at 892-2203.
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