Apsethus the god

Hippolytus tells the story that Apsethus of Libya trained parrots to fly over North Africa crying out “Apsethus is a god,” and Libyans were taken in and began to offer sacrifices to him.

Then a “clever Greek” caught one of the parrots, and retrained it to cry out: “Apsethus, having caged us, compelled us to say Apsethus is a god.” Betrayed, the Libyans burned Apsethus at the stake.

All you can say is, that’s some parrot.