The Great E-squawk! How Linlithgow parrot earned celebrity status after eluding capture for six months

IT WAS a bid for freedom worthy of The Great Escape.

First, a wire fence was carefully cut. Then, a wriggle through a narrow tunnel. Finally, a sneaky squeeze through a tight gap underneath a door.

Then Jack, an Australian Rosella parrot, was free. And his success in evading capture for six months made him a local celebrity.

 

There was an appearance at a football match, a bit of a flap at the rugby and some cheeky fun evading his owner’s attempts to recapture him with a net.

All of which led to Jack getting his own Facebook page, which attracted 500 follows and numerous sightings around West Lothian.

It was November last year when Jack disappeared from his cage in the garden of his owners, Alistair and Jill Old, in Linlithgow.

Alistair said: “I could hear him but I couldn’t see him.

“Then I realised there was a hole – he had managed to break through the chicken wire on the ground, through a burrow dug by the rabbits we used to keep, through to the other side of the cage and squeezed his way under the door there and was up in the trees.”

 

He was spotted on a nearby housing estate, visiting bird-feeders, and Alistair attempted to catch him with a peanut trap.

“No chance, he wouldn’t go near it.

“We’ve had him for about eight or nine years and he’s always been outside so I wasn’t worried about the weather but I was worried about predators, buzzards or sparrowhawks.”

But Jack soon showed that he was able to hold his own. “I got one phone call to say, ‘I’ve seen Jack, he’s harassing the pheasants in a field’.

“Then I got a call to say, ‘your parrot is on the beach at Blackness’.

“His call is very close to an oystercatcher’s. I think perhaps he had followed them.

“He was there for about three weeks.

“I think he saw he oystercatchers on the mud at the beach and was thinking: How do I get out there?”

With reports of sightings flooding in, Alistair would soon arrive on the scene but Jack always proved too smart.

“I went out a couple of times with my hat, my gauntlets and my big fishing net but I couldn’t get him.”

Jack’s celebrity escalated when he appeared on the pitch during a local rugby match to the amusement of fans.

“I went up to try to catch him and, as soon as he saw me, he jumped on to a fence.

“Every time I got close to him, he’d move just a little further away along the fence.

“The crowd thought it was hilarious.

“In fact, the match wasn’t going well for the Reds and one of the crowd shouted out that he would be better than any of the wingers. I had to just sit and give up. People took photographs of me in my gauntlets with my net and put them on Facebook.”

 

Clearly a sports fan, Jack also visited the local football club, Linlithgow Rose.

“He was sitting on the goalposts. The away fans were going absolutely daft saying he was the Rose’s lucky mascot,” said Alistair.

Jack was finally recaptured when he flew into a chicken coop in a family’s garden and they closed the door on him.

Even then he was wary of coming back into the fold.

“I took a cage down with corn on the cobs hooked on to tempt him in.

“Jack went up to the door, turned and looked at me and reached his claw in – he couldn’t reach the corn so he climbed up on to the roof, moved the hook the corn was hanging on closer to the door, went back to the door and reached in for it – he never actually went into the cage.”

Alistair finally deployed his net and Jack’s months of freedom came to an end.

“It was a real dilemma about catching him – he was really loving it out there – but in the end we were concerned about his well-being.”

Even though he is back in his cage, his fame lives on with the local bowling club creating Free Jack T-shirts which they wore at the town’s festival, Marches Day, earlier this month.

Alistair revealed: “Now we walk down the street and get stopped by people asking how Jack is.

“We’re famous because of this parrot!”