Text 1: Living with Pepper, by Owen Tranter

An original contemporary blog.

Pepper arrived in our house three years ago, in a cat carrier, swearing. She is an African grey parrot, and her previous owner, an elderly man who had kept her for twenty-six years, had taught her some vocabulary I won’t repeat here. When he moved into a care home, she came to us through a parrot rescue charity.

Nobody warned me how much work a parrot is. Pepper eats fresh vegetables, pellets and a few nuts every day, and her cage, which is bigger than our wardrobe, needs cleaning daily. More importantly, she needs company. African greys are flock birds and as clever as a young child, and a bored grey may pull out her own feathers. When Pepper first came to us, her chest was almost bare.

So she spends at least four hours a day out of her cage, sitting on my shoulder while I work or tearing up cardboard boxes stuffed with treats. We play a game where I hide a walnut under one of three cups. She wins every time.

Her feathers have grown back now, and her language has improved. She says ‘Morning, love’ when I come downstairs and does a perfect impression of the microwave.

African greys can live for sixty years. Pepper is twenty-nine, which means that one day she may outlive me too. The charity has already asked who will take her if she does. It’s a strange thing to put in a will.

Text 2: The bird market on a Sunday morning, by A Correspondent

An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this feature, published in a London newspaper in 1862, a journalist describes a street market where songbirds were bought and sold.

Every Sunday morning, from seven o’clock until church time, a narrow street in the east of the city is given up to the sale of birds, and a stranger who wanders into it finds himself in a perfect din of song.

Cages are piled upon barrows and hung upon every railing and shutter: linnets, larks, thrushes and above all goldfinches, which are the especial favourites of the working men of the district. Most of these were caught in nets in the fields around the city by bird-catchers, who sell them at threepence or fourpence apiece. A good singer, proved by trial, will fetch as much as a sovereign.

The cages are for the most part very small, scarcely larger than a quart pot, and it was painful to see a skylark, a bird made for the open sky, beating its wings against the wooden bars. Yet the men who buy them are far from unkind. A silk weaver with whom we talked told us that his goldfinch had hung in his window for eleven years, that it was fed on the best canary seed and a little groundsel which he walked two miles to gather, and that he would sooner go without his own dinner than let it want.

Many of these men match their birds against one another at singing, and the bird that sings the most songs in a quarter of an hour wins its master a prize.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what keeping a pet bird involved.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.