"It doesn't look all that tough nowadays, but try to get a a bird to hold a little stick basically in its beak. The first time, he snapped it right in half," Cota said. A.J. can also dunk a tiny basketball on a tiny court. He rolls over. He shakes. His play dead is spooky.
A "Tonight" show darling from the end of the Johnny Carson era, A.J. and Cota are staging a comeback thanks to such Web sites as YouTube.com. A.J. has a MySpace.com page and his own Web site.
The 16-year-old parakeet recently won an "outrageous bird" viral video contest sponsored by MagRack, an on-demand television network. A.J.'s sporting skills impressed a 13-member celebrity panel that included actor Carol Spinney, Sesame Street's "Big Bird" since 1969, and Tippi Hedren, who got her star turn in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 classic "The Birds."
"I've never seen a little parakeet that was that athletic," said Hedren, who learned to love her avian co-stars despite Hitchcock's ruthless plot. "He was really astounding with his golf game and the basketball. It's just too cute, too adorable. And he looked like he was having fun with it, too."
Cota, 38, owes his extended 15 minutes of fame to two dead parakeets.
The first bird belonged to a college girlfriend. Cota was left to care for it. It died.
"A fluke," he insists. He tried to slip in a replacement parakeet — and ended up single with plenty of free time to train his new pet parakeet, named "Axl" for the lead singer of Guns N' Roses.
Axl was accidentally crushed only hours before he was scheduled to perform on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" in May 1990. Cota's college roommate fell asleep and rolled on top of the bird in a hotel room provided by NBC. The death made national news.
Carson turned the mishap into a comedy bit. Wearing a black armband, he hosted an on-air memorial service for Axl, complete with "Taps" performed by Doc Severinsen. Carson gave Cota a new parakeet, A.J., whose name is a nod to Axl and to Carson. He told Cota to come back on the show when he'd trained the new bird.
Cota and A.J. performed for Carson. They have also been on with Jay Leno and on David Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks."
Cota, who works for sports apparel distributor in southwest Florida, stumbled into the world of bird training by accident.
In college, he and his friends were impressed by Axl's skills at the college drinking game "quarters." The goal is to bounce quarters into a glass, or drink if you miss. Axl would run down runaway quarters and dunk them.
"The bird became kind of like the wild card," Cota said. "You could bid to have the bird on your team, so if you missed and the bird would put it in, you'd still get credit. So I just turned that quarter game into basketball."
A.J. now knows far more tricks than Axl did. Cota and his friends have built elaborate sets including a basketball court featuring the Portland Trail Blazers' logo and a putting green complete with plastic putter and a golf bag.
Next up on A.J.'s training agenda: Water skiing.
"I don't think there is any limit to what I can show him," Cota said.
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