Medieval Jewish merchants used to travel from Cairo to India and back, a voyage that could take two years. In India, among the other goods they bought for resale in Egypt, they often acquired young parrots. On the long homeward voyage they trained these parrots to recite the Torah in Hebrew. Scripturally literate parrots commanded high prices in Cairo. I would like to imagine that these learned birds enjoyed a bar mitzvah on arrival for their mastery of the weekly haftorah, but somehow I doubt it. The point about parrots, after all, is that while they can mimic speech, our defining characteristic, they remain utterly dissimilar to us.

Cantorial parrots don’t appear in Paul Carter’s dazzling new “Parrot” (Reaktion, 213 pages, $19.95), but that’s about the only psittacine manifestation he overlooks. Mr. Carter, improbably enough, is described as a “professorial research fellow” in the University of Melbourne’s faculty of architecture. But after reading his marvellous book, I think he should be elevated instantly to the cockatoo chair at some prestigious Pollytechnical. Forgive me, but parrots, insidious ventriloquists, do this to you. Mr. Carter’s book is full of such puns, plays on words, and raucous coinages, such as “parrotics” and “parroternalia” – all good fun, but catching.

“Parrot” is the newest title in Reaktion Books’ superb series “Animal.” Each volume – a dozen have appeared, including “Rat,” “Cockroach,” “Dog,” and “Oyster” – combines lavish illustration with incisive and often quite witty text. Each is a sort of biography of a species, but as much attention is paid to human interaction and imaginings as to the creatures themselves. In Mr. Carter’s study you learn very little about parrot anatomy or behavior but a great deal about human appropriation of the parrot – the word along with the bird itself – as symbol, emblem, totem, and domestic “companion” (he includes some very funny parrot jokes, too). As a result I finished the book almost convinced that the living, screeching, relentlessly sociable bird itself may be ultimately unknowable in any coherent sense.

Here I should disclose a personal interest. For years I dreamed of owning a parrot, preferably a macaw or an Amazon gray. It didn’t take long to find out that the world of parrot ownership is completely bonkers. Manuals and dedicated magazines abound, giving tips on everything from the importance of hot breakfasts for parrots to the excruciating process of teaching a parrot to take a shower (don’t ask).

Dire warnings accompany the advice: Thus, never remove your pet’s cage cover until breakfast is ready or you risk a cacophony of outrage; never leave a parrot alone during “adolescence,” even if it means quitting your job; and never leave the parrot in the bedroom when you’re making love, since parrots are attracted to intense utterances – grand opera as well as orgasms – and memorize them on the spot, only to repeat them back during formal dinner parties.

In the end, you don’t “own” a parrot anymore than you own a cat; a parrot owns you and, however affectionate, only suffers your deference. What can equal the condescension of a cat? Only the mischievous dignity of a cockatoo comes close. Parrots, again like cats, are ceremonial; they insist on unspoken protocols.

Ultimately, what decided the question for me once and for all was one unforgettable glimpse, during a slog through the Peruvian rainforest, of three sudden macaws skimming the treeline. I’d never seen free parrots before, and the beauty of their swoop, coupled with the harsh guffawing cries they made, all that rowdy jubilance on the wing, made me ashamed of ever considering keeping one in a cage.

Mr. Carter’s book falls into three sections under headings of his own devising. First comes what he calls “parrotics,” or the classification and taxonomy of parrots; he is very good on the confusions and ambiguities of this endeavor. As he notes,

Parrots defy classification not by coming in all shapes and sizes, but because they are chromatically mutable, promiscuously sociable, verbally equivocal, and intellectually enigmatic. They are the supplement of creativity that slips through the net of systems designed to fix identity and function.

His next section involves “parroternalia,” in which he offers an amazingly broad survey of parrots in folklore, mythology, literature, and art, all accompanied by sumptuous illustrations. Here the parrot is considered as “sign,” less a bird than a feathered network of associations connecting such otherwise disparate figures as Frida Kahlo, Lewis Carroll, Flaubert, Tintin, the Pennsylvania Lottery, the Kama Sutra, and Monty Python, among many others.

Mr. Carter’s final chapter concerns “parrotology” and the fabled mimicry of parrots. This is a complex subject. Do parrots really mimic us or do we, as Mr. Carter suggests, actually mimic them? With sly parrotic humor he notes that psychotherapy mimics the behavior of parrots in that the therapist routinely rephrases and repeats the analysand’s statements in time-honored “Polly wants a cracker” fashion.

Sometimes Mr. Carter’s premises seem overly grandiose, as when he remarks, “The success of parrots in colonizing our global network of shared significations invites us to redefine the boundaries of society and the media.” Sometimes, too, his ire, not only at poachers and smugglers of wild birds – entirely justified – but at parrot-breeders, environmentalists, and researchers, seems excessive and makes him strident. Yet the grim statistics have fueled his wrath; too many species face extinction, especially from loss of habitat. Beyond this, Mr. Carter loves parrots, both “the parrot” – that prismatic mimic in the mirror of our imaginations – and the fabulous and obstreperous birds themselves, and his devotion occasionally brooks no rivals.

Philosophers, as Mr. Carter notes, tend to dislike parrots. Perhaps this is because man has always defined himself as “the rational animal” – that is, the animal endowed with articulate speech – and parrots with their wisecracking mimicry subvert this cherished self-image. Mr. Carter holds out an alternative hope; that parrots

in the benevolence of their squawking laughter … offer us a different way of understanding reality, one in which noise does not drown out tenderness, attachment and regret but, rather, amplifies it in so many directions that it becomes a new jungle, one where communication and culture are not linked by an = sign but whose relationship resembles the net.

Throughout this passionate and brilliant book he contrasts the net with the cage; the cage confines and delimits, the net allows for slippage and escape. I hope he’s right, and that his net is made of meshes wide enough for these plumed and loquacious companions of our imaginations to wing freely forever.

eormsby@nysun.com