Paranoid Parrot

Confirmed 424,308

Part of a series on Advice Animals. [View Related Entries]

About

Paranoid Parrot is an advice animal image macro series featuring a blue and yellow parrot looking over its shoulder. The captions often relay a mundane scenario or an everyday situation (ex: "save game file") followed by an irrational response driven by paranoia.

Origin

While the photographer is unknown, the original photo of the bird was seen on the Internet as early as 2004, when it was entered as part of a Photoshop contest on Worth1000.^[1]

In 2007, the same image was used to illustrate how to use filters on a Japanese OpenCV 1.0 reference site.^[2] The picture of the parrot was also freely distributed during the 2000s as a wallpaper labeled “Amazon parrot.”^[3] The bird has been identified as a Hyacinth Macaw^[4], which is the largest macaw and the largest flying parrot species. They are native to central and eastern South America, where they are currently endangered due to habitat loss and trapping.

Spread

The image macro stemmed from 4chan but did not become popular until August 2010. The single topic Tumblr blog F Yeah Paranoid Parrot^[5] made its first post on August 10th, 2010. That month, Buzzfeed^[6] featured a series of 40 Paranoid Parrot images.

On November 9th, 2010, the Chive^[7] highlighted 27 macros. Ten days later, the earliest instance of Paranoid Parrot was added to Memebase.^[8]

ParanoidParrot.com^[9] was registered on December 4th, 2010. A companion Twitter account, paranoidxparrot^[10], was created the next day.

It also has been a popular tag on Tumblr, not only for instances of the image, but to accompany stories of paranoia.^[11]