When you think of the longest-living animals, chances are your brain doesn’t automatically go for “relatively small breed of parrot”. But when Cocky Bennett, a cockatoo and local legend from Sydney, Australia, died in 1916, he had reached an age that even most humans can only dream of.

At a reported 120 years old, Cocky was born at a time when a man named George Washington was calling himself President of some new upstart country in the West, and Napoleon was just some guy in the French army. He predated the discoveries of both the Rosetta Stone and the platypus; he may even have been older than the first vaccine.

In contrast, the world he left was one deep into one of the deadliest conflicts in history, in which tanks and machine guns had replaced muskets and horses. By the time he died, planes could fly on autopilot; Londoners were taking the escalator down to catch the Tube to work every morning; and Hollywood had fallen in love with a little Cockney clown named Charlie Chaplin.

How unusual was his lifespan? As a domesticated sulfur-crested cockatoo, Cocky could have expected to live a good 80 years or so – roughly the same lifespan as the humans who looked after him. Beating that threshold by a full 50 percent, then, is remarkable – and it’s not surprising that Cocky outlived at least two of his owners over the years.

“Cocky spent his first 78 years travelling the world with Captain [George] Ellis, his owner, who plied his ship in the South Sea Islands’ trade,” wrote historian Catie Gilchrist in 2014.

But when Ellis died at the ripe old age of 87, Cocky was taken in by the captain’s nephew. After having circumnavigated the globe a reported seven times with his previous owner, Cocky took a nice quiet retirement with a couple named Joseph and Sarah Bowden – “then probably the licensees of Bowden’s Clubhouse near the corner of Hunter and Castlereagh streets, Sydney,” Gilchrist wrote.

But it wasn’t until 1889, when Joseph died, Sarah remarried, and the new couple moved to a place named (really) Tom Ugly’s Point, in the south of Sydney, that Cocky really came into his own as a celebrity. After Sarah and her new husband Charles Bennett bought the local Sea Breeze Hotel, the geriatric cockatoo “lived in the hotel and for many years he ruled as ‘Cock of the Bar’,” described Gilchrist. 

“He was extremely talkative and popular and known to many thousands of residents and visitors far and wide who became acquainted with his colorful character,” she wrote. “Cocky had a cage on the hotel’s front verandah where he could watch the passing parade, greeting old friends in his raucous and inimitable style.”

The bird was known for his comic catchphrases, such as “one at time gentlemen, please” when other birds harassed him, and, famously, “if I had another bloody feather I’d fly!” Of course, that latter joke needs some context: thanks to a bout with psittacine beak and feather – a common viral disease that even today kills up to 50 percent of cockatoos before they reach sexual maturity, per The Sydney Morning Herald – Cocky spent the last few decades of his life virtually bald.

The same disease was responsible for his unusual beak: long, gnarled, and twisted, it was only by eating pre-mashed food that Cocky could get any nutrients at all by the end of his life.

He died on May 26, 1916 – he “maintained [his] ‘patter’ till the day before [his] death,” according to reports of the time – and you might think that would be the end of his story. A remarkably long life, but still, just a bird. You’d be wrong.

In fact, Cocky left an impressive impact for one so small and featherless: “Sarah Bennett attached a collection box to Cocky’s cage, and his chatter invited donations for St. George Hospital,” notes the Sutherland Shire Libraries local history resource.

He didn’t raise enough for a wing – a shame, since he evidently needed one – but “enough funds were raised to supply the hospital with three beds, each bearing a plaque inscribed with the words: ‘Cocky Bennett Cot’.”