Woman mistakes missing parrot’s squawks for faulty fire alarm

A woman ‘pushed to the edge’ after a shrill ‘faulty fire alarm’ sounded non-stop for seven days was stunned to discover the source of the racket was – a parrot in her garden. Shanna Sexton, 25, was driven to distraction by the re-occuring high-pitched tone and even called in workmen to try and locate the problem.

But Shanna was staggered to spot an African Grey Congo parrot perched on a water butt as she hung out washing in the garden. The noisy parrot, called Sammi, had escaped from neighbour Louise Ledger’s house a week earlier and spent seven days in the garden mimicking a smoke alarm.



Shanna, from Torquay, Devon, said: ”I’d been hearing the noise for ages. I looked around the house checking everything. I even pulled out the washing machine. In the end a workman said it sounded like it may be my smoke alarm. We had problems with our smoke alarm before and I thought ‘here we go again’.

”It was driving me mad but I just could not find out where it was coming from.” But the mystery was solved once Shanna spotted Sammi in the garden – as she had seen the ‘Missing Parrot’ posters stuck up around the neighbourhood.