The book Thinking like a Parrot: Perspectives from the Wild provides an insider’s perspective into the daily lives of parrots in the wild. Parrots are fascinating creatures for researchers and the public alike. Bond and Diamond describe them as having exaggerated comical appearances, as resembling clever but manipulative and capricious leprechauns, and as having playful but often unpredictable behavior. Humans, both researchers and the general public alike, can be fascinated by these characteristics, but the same things that cause parrots to be fascinating research subjects and entrancing pets can also make them extraordinarily difficult to study or to keep them healthy and socially engaged in captivity. The goal of this book is to broadly synthesize a half-century of wild parrot biology research: how parrots forage, communicate, socialize, and behave, and to examine parrot biology from the parrots’ own perspectives. The authors synthesize what is known about parrot biology into seven major sections in the book, covering parrot origins, behavior, sociality, cognition, disruption, conservation, and interactions between parrots and people, especially within the context of the pet trade. Along with the general science, each section also includes short vignettes, drawn largely from first-hand experiences of the authors, who have been studying parrot sociality, cognition, behavior, and vocalizations of wild parrots for more than 30 years. This mixed approach provides readers with both a broader scientific and synthetic perspective into parrot biology as well as a zoomed-in view of the detailed behaviors, habits, and idiosyncrasies of particular species. This mixed general/specific approach is a particularly effective way to express one of the tensions in the book: parrots are easily identifiable as a group and share many characteristics, yet parrots also differ from each other with a wide diversity of body sizes, colors, and natural history quirks that make it difficult to generalize parrot biology across species. The authors deal with this issue by summarizing general patterns in most of the sections, then illustrating these generalities with specific examples from species they know well. For me, focusing too much on generic parrot patterns leads in some cases to a frustrating amount of over-generalization: just because some species show evidence for play or a certain kind of social structure does not mean that all parrots follow suit. For example, the chapter on vocal communication generalizes the common (but not universal) patterns of call convergence we often find in wild parrot populations, where calls within pairs, groups, or regions tend to show similarities. An exception to this pattern has been documented in new research within wild Monk Parakeet (Myiopsitta monachus) populations, where individual call structures show a surprising lack of pair or geographic similarity, suggesting that the importance of individual identity and identification may outweigh benefits from signaling group affiliation (Smith-Vidaurre et al. 2020). Could this be evidence for a more individualistic societal organization for this species, compared to other parrots? We do not yet know, but this kind of divergence from “typical” patterns is one of the things that makes parrots such a fascinating system for comparative work. For many social and cognitive behaviors, only a few species have been studied, and I am very cautious about generalizing too broadly. However, a book geared toward a popular audience also cannot qualify every statement about the science of parrot biology with details about sample sizes, studies across different species, and the study methods employed without quickly doubling in size. One of the cryptic benefits of these generalizations is that the entire book is filled with hidden gems that can inspire future research projects, especially for researchers interested in using a comparative perspective. Species comparisons can allow us to disentangle cases when a particular species’ behaviors or capabilities differ from that observed commonly in other parrot species. These differences can provide insight into how and why that species may have evolved its own distinctive methods for surviving or thriving in their socio-ecological environments. New data collection methods and quantitative approaches allow us to quantify a depth and breadth of details on wild parrot behavior that was previously impossible (e.g., Aplin et al. 2020) and can even provide insight into the ecology and behaviors of extinct parrot species (Burgio et al. 2017). Careful controlled experiments on neural and vocal plasticity are also providing new insight into parrot learning and cognition (e.g., Whitney et al. 2015; Wright et al. 2015). Combined, comparative approaches, quantitative methods, and controlled experiments provide new opportunities for understanding factors leading to the evolution of parrot behavior, social, or cognitive traits in different species. I believe we are entering a new era of parrot research, where comparative and quantitative analyses build on the foundation of parrot natural history that we have amassed in the last 50 years, providing future researchers with rich opportunities for new insight. Thinking Like a Parrot is likely to be of interest to audiences who are fans of deep dives into the socio-ecology of charismatic species. The writing style is accessible and engaging for scientists and the public alike, especially anyone already enamored of parrots in either the wild or as pets. For people with pet parrots, this book provides a fantastic overview of the extraordinary depth of wild parrot behavior and a glimpse into what the lives of their pets might have looked like in the wild. The book does a nice job of recognizing that parrot behavior has been both preserved and warped by captivity and life as a pet. As an example, Bond and Diamond highlight that while conservation approaches have saved some threatened and engendered species from extinction, the complex nature of parrot sociality, cognition, learning, and culture have also led to unanticipated effects. Very recent work has shown that endangered Puerto Rican amazons (Amazona vittata) appear to have recently developed distinctive learned call types as a side effect of captive breeding and reintroduction efforts, potentially resulting in the artificial creation of novel dialect types in different managed populations (Martínez and Logue 2020). While management efforts can preserve the genetics of a species, we still do not know what kinds of behaviors or aspects of sociality or culture may be unintentionally lost or irrevocably changed during the course of these human interventions. Bond and Diamond do a nice job of highlighting these human-mediated changes: they write that the ways in which parrots live and behave in the wild today need to be seen as a reflection of ancient adaptations to conditions that have been distorted by the impacts of a rapidly changing modern world (p. 120). They end the book by stressing these relationships between people and their pet parrots, which can be rich, long-lasting, and rewarding. These charismatic birds share many similarities with humans, but parrots are not humans and we should all be careful to not over anthropomorphize parrot behavior. Parrots are, however, fascinating and sophisticated animals worthy of being better understood.