It was working months ago, but the satellite kept connecting to someone else's phone before they could get the connection to work.

This is interesting. I've noticed that most of my parrot's senses seem duller than mine (unlike with, say, dogs) - not as picky with taste (except staleness), no meaningful signs of a significant sense of smell, has trouble seeing things that are right near him sometimes, etc - but he seems more atuned to having rapid reactions to anything unusual than I am. Like, at my old place, whenever a chunk of ice would break off the roof and crash down to the ground below, he'd be reacting before my senses even registered the event. I wonder if the "high framerate" thing is in general a "fast communication with the senses" in parrots. Certainly there's a very short distance between most of their sensory organs and the brain. And it's certainly useful for a prey animal to be able to react to sudden events (like, say, a striking snake, or a diving hawk glinting through the branches)

The real question is how much BIRD CRED you got.

Around 2008 I had a budgie, but I sometimes had to take work trips. I had someone to feed him and check on him, but I wanted to stay in touch. So I set up a camera at the cage. The computer was right in his line of sight about 6 feet away (he lived in my home office, where I normally worked). Given the services of the day, I created him a Skype account and set it to only (and automatically) answer calls from friends, me being his only friend, of course.

He LOVED IT and was always very excited when I called him. Sometimes he looked confused about not being able to see me, but he loved hearing me.

He had a HUGE window to the balcony, but I was able to observe his typical behavior when I spied om him. Which was: he was pretty bored and just kinda sat around all the time. Play with toys occasionally, but he was mainly interested in me. Which makes sense since normally I was always physically in the room with him.

Does the iPad still NOT ship with a native calculator app?

"I'm here live . I'm not a parrot." ;)

They're intelligent social animals. Even just a change in eye contact from me alters my Amazon's behavior. He's incredibly attuned to my posture, tone of voice, mannerisms, etc, to clue in whether he's going to e.g. be getting a treat or scolded for misbehavior or whatnot. I can't imagine that a video without that back-and-forth would stimulate him.

I don't watch TV anymore, but he used to just tune it out. Rather, he'd tune into *me*. He'd laugh at the funny parts of shows and the like, not because he understood the humour, but because he was paying attention to me, and I was laughing, so he wanted to join in. And then I'd react amusedly to his taking part, he'd get attention, and getting attention was in turn a reward to him. They like getting reactions to the things they do. A video won't do that.

And yeah, he understands what screens are - same as mirrors. Some smaller psittacines are known to strongly interact with mirrors as if they're other birds, but in my experience, the larger ones don't do that; they quickly learn it's their reflection and stop caring. As a side note, I actually tried the mirror test with my Amazon twice, but each time I got a null result. You're supposed to put an unusual mark or lightweight object on their head where they can't see it, put them in front of a mirror, and if they interact with the mirror like it's another animal, they don't recognize it's their reflection; while if they use it to try to preen the hidden mark/object, it's a sign of recognition. But my Amazon didn't give a rat's arse. I might as well have put him in front of a wall for all it mattered; he gave the mark zero attention. Didn't care about the reflection of a bird. Didn't care about the mark on his head. Just sat there waiting for me to put him back on his cage :P I couldn't get him to interact with the reflection at all. Nor does he react to birds on TV. By contrast, he'll VERY MUCH interact with a real bird (he hates them all... he's very antisocial with nonhumans).

As I said, you clearly don't have children, and therefore have no idea what you're talking about. In general I'm opposed to arguments of the form "You're not an X so you can't comment", but when it comes to raising kids, it's just the truth. No one who hasn't done it has any idea what it's really like.

Doesn't matter, because if you had children you'd know that no one is capable of being sufficiently attentive.

As a Googler... I think this comment hits the mark, far more than any of the others.

It is not, not even then. You'd need at least three parents: One to go to work, one to stay with the kid, one to cover for the second when they have to do something other than watching the kid (clean the house, do the laundry, use the bathroom, etc.). Oh, sure, you can try to put the kid in a safe environment while you do stuff, but many young children are shockingly good at finding ways to get into stuff they're not supposed to get into, and do it far faster than you would expect.

A team of nannies can do it.

People used to live in the middle of a village of other people who watched out for their neighbors' kids when their parents had to take their eyes off of them. And kids used to die. A lot. Far more than we'd consider acceptable today.

And not just one. KIds vary widely and it's not uncommon for parents who've only dealt with a single child to assume that all kids are like that one. Usually adding a second kid is enough to open their eyes when they realize that none of what worked on the first kid works with the second and vice versa. Occasionally parents get two that are very similar and don't learn this until they have a third, or until grandkids come along, or other close exposure.

How many children have you raised? I'll bet, one. One who happened to be easy to dissuade from putting stuff in their mouth, so you have extrapolated from that sample of one to all kids everywhere.

The fact is that kids aren't all the same. Some are easy to train, some aren't.

Source: I'm a father (4X) and a grandfather. Based on my sample, I should perhaps assert that all babies and toddlers stick everything in their mouths and there's nothing you can do to teach them otherwise until they're at least two, and usually three. But I know that kids are all very different, and so I can imagine that there may be some child who can be taught not to put stuff in their mouth younger than that.

I see you don't have children.

This is like sending coals from eastern Newcastle to western Newcastle.