Parrot

The parrot is one of the most charming mobs in Minecraft and also one of the most useless in any practical sense. It cannot fight for you, it cannot carry items, and it cannot breed. What it can do is sit on your shoulder looking fabulous, mimic the sounds of nearby hostile mobs to keep you on your toes, and dance like nobody is watching whenever a jukebox starts playing. That alone has made it one of the most beloved mobs in the game.

Parrots spawn exclusively in jungle biomes, and finding one can be an exercise in patience. They are rare, they blend into the dense foliage, and jungles are already one of the most disorienting biomes to navigate. But once you find one and tame it with seeds, you have yourself a loyal shoulder companion that will follow you across the Overworld — or at least until you accidentally jump and knock it off.

Five color variants exist — red, blue, green, cyan, and gray — each inspired by real-world parrot species. They are tiny, passive, immune to fall damage, and will absolutely convince you a Creeper is behind you when there is nothing there. Welcome to parrot ownership.

Overview / Quick Stats

Appearance

Parrots are among the smallest mobs in Minecraft. They have a compact, blocky bird model with a short beak, small rectangular wings, a fan-shaped tail, and tiny legs. They are visually distinct from chickens thanks to their more colorful textures and their tendency to actually fly rather than just flap uselessly off a cliff.

Five color variants exist, and each one draws inspiration from a real-world parrot species. The red parrot is based on the scarlet macaw. The blue parrot takes after the hyacinth macaw. The cyan variant references the blue-and-yellow macaw. The green parrot is modeled after the military macaw or possibly the Antipodes Island parakeet. The gray variant is based on the cockatiel — reportedly because the model designer had a pet cockatiel named Cauliflower.

All five variants share the same model and hitbox. There is no baby parrot form in vanilla Minecraft because parrots cannot breed. When perched on a player’s shoulder, the parrot appears as a small rendered model sitting on the player’s character model and is visible in the inventory screen as well.

Behavior & AI

• Movement: Parrots move primarily by flying. They flap their wings to gain altitude but will tire and land after a short time. When struck, they fly upward. They flap their wings when falling, negating all fall damage — similar to chickens.
• Swimming: Parrots swim in water by flapping their wings to stay on the surface, preventing drowning under normal conditions.
• Crowding: Untamed parrots have a peculiar tendency to crowd around nearby mobs, including hostile ones. You will regularly find wild parrots clustered around zombies and creepers as if they are attending a very dangerous meet-and-greet.
• Mob Imitation: Parrots mimic the idle sounds of nearby hostile and certain neutral mobs within a 20-block cuboid range. The imitated sound plays at a higher pitch than the original. They tend to face the direction of the mob they are mimicking. Occasionally, a parrot will imitate a mob that is not actually nearby, which is exactly as alarming as it sounds.
• Taming: Parrots can be tamed by feeding them wheat seeds, melon seeds, pumpkin seeds, beetroot seeds, or torchflower seeds. Each feeding has a 1 in 10 (10%) chance of success. Once tamed, right-clicking the parrot toggles it between sitting and following.
• Following & Teleportation: A tamed parrot that is not sitting will follow the player. If the player moves more than 12 blocks away, the parrot teleports to them. Parrot teleportation is completely silent — this is intentional, not a bug.
• Shoulder Perching: Walking through a tamed parrot that is standing on the ground causes it to perch on the player’s shoulder. A player can have one parrot on each shoulder. Parrots prefer the left shoulder first. While on a shoulder, the parrot is no longer a separate entity — its data is stored in the player’s NBT.
• Dismounting from Shoulder: A parrot dismounts the player’s shoulder when the player loses height (jumping, walking downhill, flying downward with elytra, using a firework rocket), takes damage, enters water, starts sleeping, or submerges in lava. In Bedrock Edition, entering a boat or minecart also dismounts the parrot.
• Dancing: When a jukebox within 3 blocks is playing a music disc, parrots bob their heads in a dancing animation. This is a reference to the Party Parrot meme. All nearby parrots dance in sync. They continue dancing as long as the disc remains in the jukebox, even after the music stops. In Bedrock Edition, parrots can even dance while perched on a player’s shoulder.
• Cookie Interaction: In Java Edition, feeding a parrot a cookie kills it instantly, emitting Poison particles. In Bedrock Edition, feeding a cookie gives it fatal poison instead. This mechanic was added because chocolate is toxic to real parrots, and Mojang changed it after community feedback when cookies were originally used to tame them during snapshots.
• Despawning: Parrots are passive animal mobs and do not despawn naturally. Tamed parrots never despawn.
• Nether Portal: A parrot sitting on a player’s shoulder prevents the player from entering a Nether portal. You need to dismount the parrot first — an easy detail to forget when you are in a hurry.

Abilities, Attacks & Status Effects

• Attack: None. Parrots are completely passive and never deal damage to any entity.
• Fall Damage Immunity: Parrots take no fall damage thanks to their wing-flapping slow-fall mechanic, identical to chickens.
• Sound Mimicry: Not an attack, but functionally one of the most useful abilities in the game for awareness. Parrots imitate hostile mob sounds at a higher pitch within 20 blocks. This includes creeper hisses, zombie groans, skeleton rattles, and more. On Peaceful difficulty, parrots do not imitate mob sounds.
• Shoulder Invulnerability: While perched on a player’s shoulder, a parrot cannot take any damage. It only becomes vulnerable again upon dismounting. However, if the player is submerged in lava when the parrot dismounts, the parrot will take fire damage immediately — even if the player has Fire Resistance.
• Status Effects: Parrots do not inflict any status effects. They can receive the Fatal Poison effect in Bedrock Edition from being fed a cookie.

Food, Taming, Breeding & Growth

• Taming Items: Wheat seeds, melon seeds, pumpkin seeds, beetroot seeds, or torchflower seeds. Each feeding attempt has a 1/10 (10%) success rate.
• Breeding: Parrots cannot breed in vanilla Minecraft. They are one of the few tameable mobs with no breeding mechanic. The advancement “The Parrots and the Bats” — awarded for breeding two animals — is named after the two mobs that ironically cannot breed.
• Baby Parrots: Do not exist in vanilla Minecraft.
• Sitting / Standing: Right-click (Java) or interact (Bedrock) on a tamed parrot to toggle between sitting and standing. A sitting parrot stays in place and does not follow or teleport.
• Leash: Parrots can be attached to a lead.

Variants, Jockeys & Special Forms

Color Variants

Parrots come in five color variants, determined by the Variant NBT tag (values 0–4). All variants share identical stats, behavior, and hitbox. The only difference is the texture.

• Red (Variant 0): Based on the scarlet macaw. Bright red body with blue and yellow wing accents.
• Blue (Variant 1): Based on the hyacinth macaw. Deep blue plumage throughout.
• Green (Variant 2): Based on the military macaw or Antipodes Island parakeet. Green body with red and blue accents.
• Cyan (Variant 3): Based on the blue-and-yellow macaw. Cyan and yellow coloring with teal head.
• Gray (Variant 4): Based on the cockatiel. Gray body with yellow head and orange cheek patches. The only variant with a crest in its real-life counterpart.

All five variants spawn with equal probability when parrots naturally generate in jungle biomes.

Spawning

Interactions with Environment & Other Mobs

• Mob Crowding: Wild parrots are drawn to nearby mobs and will cluster around them. This includes hostile mobs like creepers, zombies, and skeletons. Tamed parrots follow the player instead.
• Ocelots & Cats: Parrots do not have a fear relationship with cats or ocelots in vanilla Minecraft. They coexist without issue.
• Wolves: Tamed wolves can kill parrots. If a player accidentally hits their own parrot and a tamed wolf is nearby, things can go badly very fast. Keep this in mind.
• Jukebox: Any parrot within 3 blocks of a playing jukebox will dance. This works for both tamed and wild parrots.
• Boats & Minecarts: Parrots can ride in boats and minecarts. When inside a minecart, the parrot’s hitbox is entirely contained within the minecart’s hitbox, making it nearly impossible to target.
• Lava: Parrots have no fire resistance. If they dismount a player who is submerged in lava, they burn and die — even if the player has Fire Resistance. The parrot does not share the player’s enchantments or effects.
• Water: Parrots swim by flapping their wings and do not drown under normal conditions.

Drops & Loot

Player Uses & Farming

• Early Warning System: The most practical use of a tamed parrot is mob detection. When a hostile mob is within 20 blocks, your parrot will mimic its sounds. Hearing a creeper hiss from your shoulder parrot before the actual creeper gets close can genuinely save your life — or at least your builds.
• Ambiance & Decoration: Parrots add life to bases and builds. Place a jukebox nearby and let them dance. They are one of the few mobs that provide purely aesthetic value in survival mode.
• Feather Farming: Technically possible but not practical. Parrots are rare, cannot breed, and drop the same feathers you can get from chickens — which breed infinitely and spawn everywhere. If you need feathers, farm chickens. If you want a parrot, keep it alive.
• Shoulder Companion: Having a parrot on your shoulder has no gameplay benefit beyond the mob imitation warnings and looking incredible. It does not provide buffs, does not increase stats, and actively prevents you from entering Nether portals. But the aesthetics alone are worth it for many players.

Commands & NBT

Common summon commands for parrots:

/summon minecraft:parrot ~ ~ ~ {Variant:0}

Summons a red parrot at your location.

/summon minecraft:parrot ~ ~ ~ {Variant:4}

Summons a gray (cockatiel) parrot.

/summon minecraft:parrot ~ ~ ~ {Variant:1,Owner:"PlayerUUID",Sitting:1b}

Summons a pre-tamed blue parrot that is sitting. Replace PlayerUUID with the actual UUID of the player.

/summon minecraft:parrot ~ ~ ~ {Variant:3,CustomName:'{"text":"Polly"}'}

Summons a cyan parrot with the custom name “Polly.”

Notable NBT keys:

• Variant — Integer (0–4). Determines the parrot’s color: 0 = red, 1 = blue, 2 = green, 3 = cyan, 4 = gray.
• Owner — UUID string. The UUID of the player who tamed the parrot. Present only on tamed parrots.
• Sitting — Byte (0b or 1b). Whether the tamed parrot is currently sitting.
• ShoulderEntityLeft / ShoulderEntityRight — Stored on the player entity, not the parrot. Contains the parrot’s full entity data when perched on a shoulder. The parrot ceases to exist as a separate entity while on the shoulder.

Tags, Gamerules & Datapack Hooks

• Entity Type Tag: #minecraft:parrot — Includes only the parrot entity type.
• Mob Category: Parrots fall under the “creature” category for spawn cap purposes.
• Loot Table Path: minecraft:entities/parrot
• Gamerule — mobGriefing: Does not affect parrots (they do not interact with blocks).
• Gamerule — doMobSpawning: Controls whether parrots naturally spawn.

Difficulty & Edition Differences

• Peaceful: Parrots do not imitate mob sounds on Peaceful difficulty because no hostile mobs exist to imitate.
• Cookie Mechanic: Java Edition kills the parrot instantly upon feeding a cookie. Bedrock Edition applies Fatal Poison, which technically allows a tiny window where the parrot is still alive (though it still dies).
• Shoulder Dancing: In Bedrock Edition, parrots can dance while perched on the player’s shoulder near a jukebox. In Java Edition, they cannot — they must be on the ground to dance.
• Sparse Jungle: Bedrock Edition allows parrots to spawn in Sparse Jungle biomes. Java Edition does not.
• Hitbox: The parrot’s hitbox is 0.9 blocks tall in Java Edition and 1.0 blocks tall in Bedrock Edition. Width is 0.5 blocks in both editions.
• Sound Imitation Bugs: In Bedrock Edition, parrots cannot imitate guardian sounds due to a misassigned sound event (MCPE-164404). Some wolf sounds also play less frequently than intended due to missing sound files (MCPE-153559).

Sounds & Audio

• Ambient: entity.parrot.ambient — Chirps, whistles, and chattering. Parrots also randomly trigger imitation sounds from nearby hostile mobs at higher pitch.
• Hurt: entity.parrot.hurt
• Death: entity.parrot.death
• Fly: entity.parrot.fly — Wing-flapping sounds during flight.
• Step: entity.parrot.step — Plays when the parrot walks on a surface.
• Eat: entity.parrot.eat — Plays when fed seeds.
• Imitation Sounds: entity.parrot.imitate.[mob] — For example, entity.parrot.imitate.creeper, entity.parrot.imitate.zombie, etc. These are the original mob sounds played at a higher pitch.
• Sound Category (Java): Parrots use the “friendly creatures” sound category.

History & Major Changes

• 17w13a (Java 1.12): Parrots added to the game. Originally tamed using cookies.
• 17w14a: Cookie taming removed after community backlash about teaching children to feed chocolate to birds. Seeds became the taming item. Feeding a cookie now kills the parrot with Poison particles.
• 1.12 release: Parrots officially released with five color variants, shoulder perching, dancing, and mob sound imitation.
• Bedrock 1.2.0: Parrots added to Bedrock Edition.
• Java 1.18 (Caves & Cliffs Part 2): World generation changes affected jungle biomes but did not change parrot spawning mechanics directly.
• Java 1.19.4 / Bedrock 1.20.0: Torchflower seeds added as a valid taming item for parrots, following the addition of torchflowers through the sniffer archaeology mechanic.

Notable Bugs & Quirks

• Infinite Dancing: The game has no built-in way to detect when a music disc finishes playing. As long as the disc stays in the jukebox, parrots continue dancing indefinitely — long after the music has stopped. This is technically a quirk, not a bug, but it looks silly.
• Silent Teleportation: Parrot teleportation makes no sound. This is confirmed intentional by Mojang, but it means your parrot can appear behind you without any audio cue.
• Nether Portal Blocking: A parrot on your shoulder prevents you from entering a Nether portal. Many players have been confused by this when they cannot figure out why the portal will not work.
• MCPE-164404: Parrots in Bedrock Edition cannot imitate guardian sounds due to a misassigned sound event.
• MCPE-153559: Certain wolf imitation sounds in Bedrock Edition play less frequently than intended because some sound files do not exist.
• Lava Dismount Death: If you swim through lava with a parrot on your shoulder, the parrot dismounts and burns. Your Fire Resistance does not protect it. This has killed more parrots than any hostile mob ever will.

Advancements / Achievements

• “The Parrots and the Bats” (Java): Awarded for breeding two animals of any type. Neither parrots nor bats can breed — the name is a play on the phrase “the birds and the bees.”
• “Best Friends Forever” (Java): Tame any animal. Taming a parrot qualifies.
• “Two by Two” (Java): Breed all breedable animal pairs. Parrots are excluded since they cannot breed.

Spin-offs, Culture & Trivia

• Party Parrot: The parrot’s dancing animation is a direct reference to the Party Parrot internet meme, which itself is based on a viral video of a kākāpō (a flightless New Zealand parrot). The Mojang team uses Party Parrot emojis in their internal Discord communications.
• Cookie Controversy: During development, parrots were tamed with cookies. The Minecraft community pointed out that chocolate is genuinely toxic to parrots in real life, and Mojang changed the mechanic within days — making cookies lethal to parrots instead. This is one of the fastest community-driven changes in Minecraft history.
• Real-World Inspirations: Each variant maps to a real parrot species. The gray variant was specifically chosen because the model designer’s pet cockatiel, Cauliflower, served as inspiration.
• Pirate Speak: In the “Pirate Speak” language option, the parrot is called “Your Best Mate” — a reference to the classic pirate-with-a-parrot trope.
• Splash Text: Warnings about not feeding chocolate or avocados to parrots appear as Minecraft splash screen text.
• Minecraft Dungeons: Parrots appear as a pet companion in Minecraft Dungeons.
• Designer Credit: The parrot model was created by RazzleberryFox, introduced to the community by Mojang artist Maria Lemón.

See Also

• Chicken — Another bird mob with similar fall-damage immunity
• Wolf — Another tameable companion mob
• Cat — Another tameable passive mob with variant textures
• Ocelot — Jungle-spawning passive mob
• Jukebox — Block that triggers parrot dancing
• Feather — Primary parrot drop