Emoji Lore
Party Parrot: The True Story of Work Chat's Favorite Bird
The small neon bird celebrating in your chat is a real parrot, the footage is a real BBC documentary, and nobody knows who made the GIF. All three of those facts are better than they sound.
By Miles Crawford
The Bird Is Real, and He Has a Government Job
Sirocco is a kakapo: a flightless, nocturnal, critically endangered parrot from New Zealand that looks like a moss-colored owl made of pillows. He caught a respiratory illness at three weeks old, so rangers hand-reared him, and he imprinted on humans so completely that he no longer considers himself a bird. New Zealand eventually made him the country's official Spokesbird for conservation. That is a real title. He has a media schedule.
The kakapo was already famous in nerd circles before the emoji. Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine visited one for the original Last Chance to See in 1989, and Adams wrote that kakapos have not only forgotten how to fly, they've forgotten that they've forgotten, so they occasionally jump out of a tree expecting to fly and "freefall like a brick." Twenty years later the BBC sent Carwardine back to film the follow-up series, this time with Stephen Fry narrating.
The Clip
In 2009, filming the kakapo episode, Carwardine got on the ground to photograph Sirocco. Sirocco came down from his tree, sized up the situation, and decided that the zoologist's head was a female kakapo. He then attempted to mate with it at length, wings flapping for balance, while Stephen Fry provided commentary from a safe distance: "You are being shagged by a rare parrot. He thinks you are a female. He's really going for it."
The BBC uploaded the footage as "Shagged by a Rare Parrot" on September 29, 2009. It has tens of millions of views. The head-bobbing rhythm of that encounter is the exact motion the emoji preserves, which means every time someone drops a party parrot in chat they are, technically, posting a bird humping a zoologist's head. HR has not been informed.
Nobody Knows Who Made the GIF
Mashable ran a real investigation in 2017 and traced the dancing GIF backwards through a chain of Slack workspaces: a Slack for high-powered Reddit moderators got it from a Midwest developers Slack, which got it from the GIF repository bukk.it, whose owner saw it in a New York coding bootcamp's Slack. There the trail goes cold. The creator has never been found, and the people closest to the source prefer it that way: "It's something that the internet as a whole owns, not one person."
What we do know: in January 2016 a Nebraska developer named John Hobbs launched cultofthepartyparrot.com (named in homage to the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow), and that June the r/PartyParrot subreddit opened. The Reddit contingent called themselves the Disciples of Sirocco, first commandment "party or die," and referred to Sirocco as "our God emperor, peace be upon him." By 2017 Slack said users had uploaded more than 7 million custom emoji, and parrot variants were turning up in programming terminals, iMessage sticker packs, a 2048 clone, and at least one tattoo.
Why He Works at Work
The party parrot is the correct response to: shipped, merged, closed, Friday, and "the client said yes." The variant system covers everything else: sad parrot for the reverted deploy, conga line for a team win, deal-with-it parrot for the person who fixed prod. The lineage is also worth knowing: the parrot is the direct descendant of the original looping dance reaction, the dancing banana.
Grab the party parrot pack for your workspace, or build the variant your specific team needs in the emoji maker. Sirocco would want it that way. Peace be upon him.