How to Tame a Parrot in Minecraft (Seeds, Never Cookies)

To tame a parrot, find one in a jungle and feed it seeds until hearts appear. Wheat, melon, pumpkin, beetroot and torchflower seeds all work, as do pitcher pods. Each seed has a one in ten chance, so bring a stack. Never feed a parrot a cookie: it kills the parrot instantly.

What you need to tame a parrot

• Seeds, about 10-20. Wheat seeds are the easiest, since breaking grass drops them. If you have a farm going (farming basics), you’ll have plenty.
• A jungle. Parrots only spawn in jungles and bamboo jungles (also sparse jungles in Bedrock), in groups of one or two.

Taming a parrot step by step

1. Find a parrot. Look up: parrots perch in the canopy and fly between trees, and they’re bright red, blue, green, cyan or gray. You’ll often hear them before you see them.
2. Get close. Parrots are curious and often fly toward you or toward other mobs nearby. Pillar up into the canopy if one sits too high.
3. Hold seeds and use them on the parrot. Smoke particles mean the seed didn’t take.
4. Keep feeding until hearts appear. One in ten per seed means about ten on average, but it can take more.

If a parrot flies off mid-taming, it hasn’t forgotten anything. Follow it and keep feeding.

Getting it on your shoulder

Walk into a standing tamed parrot and it hops onto your shoulder. You can carry two, one on each side; the left shoulder fills first. Parrots also fly to your shoulder on their own unless you’ve told them to sit.

Use the parrot with an empty hand to make it sit or stand. A sitting parrot stays put; a standing one follows you and teleports if you get 12 blocks away.

The parrot leaves your shoulder when you take damage, touch water or powder snow, land on a block half a block or more above you, drop off a ledge, start flying with an elytra or sleep. In Bedrock, a shoulder parrot stops you from using a Nether portal, so take it off first.

Why bother: the mob warning

Parrots imitate the sounds of hostile mobs within 20 blocks, at a higher pitch than the real thing. A parrot on your shoulder hissing like a creeper or rattling like a skeleton tells you something nasty is nearby, even through walls. On a long cave trip, that warning is worth a lot.

They also dance next to a jukebox playing a music disc, which has no practical use and is still the best thing about them.

Keeping parrots alive

• No cookies, ever. In Java the cookie does enough damage to kill instantly; in Bedrock it applies fatal poison.
• They can’t be bred, so a dead parrot is gone for good. Keep spares sitting safely at home.
• Shoulder parrots in Bedrock can’t take damage while perched, which makes the shoulder the safest place for them on a trip.

For more on parrot colors, the full list of sounds they copy and edition differences, see the parrot mob page.