Amazona volume, without the sugar-coating
Of all the parrots people commonly keep, Amazonas are near the top of the noise table, and a flat is the hardest place to keep one. A healthy Amazona greets the morning at full volume, holds loud, rolling conversations with itself and the household, laughs, imitates, and punctuates the day with sudden shrieks that seem wildly out of proportion to whatever caused them. This is flock communication evolved to carry across a forest canopy, and it does not scale down because your living room is small. In a house, much of that sound stays your problem. In a flat it becomes the experience of the neighbours below your floor, above your ceiling, and on both sides of your walls, whether they chose a parrot or not.
The pattern neighbours actually hear
Amazona noise is not constant, and that unpredictability is part of the flat problem. The dawn chorus arrives early, including weekends, when your neighbours are asleep and your own lie-in is sacrificed to a bird that believes sunrise is a group activity. Evenings bring a second boisterous period, often overlapping with people getting home from work. Between those peaks an Amazona may be quiet for hours, then erupt because a delivery arrived, a favourite person left the room, or excitement tipped over during play. Hormonal spring weeks raise both volume and frequency noticeably. A neighbour can adapt to predictable noise; a bird that is silent all afternoon and suddenly screaming at dawn is the pattern that generates complaints to landlords and councils.
Leases, buildings, and the practical test
Before falling for an Amazona, read your tenancy agreement for pet clauses and talk to your landlord in plain terms, because a noise-driven eviction fight helps nobody, least of all the bird that then needs rehoming. Older conversions with thin floors are the worst setting; modern concrete blocks with real sound insulation are meaningfully better, and an end flat with the cage against an exterior wall gives the sound fewer paths into other homes. If you already know your neighbours, an honest conversation before the bird arrives — acknowledging the morning noise, offering your phone number, promising to act on problems — buys goodwill that silence never will. Several complaints handled graciously can be survivable; a bird discovered through the wall usually is not.
What reduces Amazona noise, and what does not
No training removes an Amazona's dawn and evening calling, and any seller promising a quiet Amazona is selling you a story. What management can do is trim the extra noise: a dark, undisturbed sleep of a full night keeps mornings civilised rather than frantic, a busy day of foraging, training, and out-of-cage time leaves less restless energy for screaming, and calmly rewarding quiet chatter instead of answering shrieks with attention stops you accidentally training the loudest behaviour. Cage placement matters too — away from the party wall, off hard echoing corners, in a room softened by rugs and curtains. Earplugs for yourself are legitimate; a bird banished to a spare room for being a bird is not, because isolation reliably makes a social parrot louder, not quieter.
Deciding with your ears, not your heart
The only reliable test is exposure: spend time around adult Amazonas at their loudest, early in the day, in a rescue or an experienced keeper's home, and picture that sound through your bedroom wall at dawn on a Sunday. If it makes you wince, believe the wince — you will hear it for decades, because Amazonas live a very long time and rehoming a loud adult is difficult. Flat dwellers who still qualify are those with solid buildings, kind neighbours, early-rising households, and genuine love of a boisterous bird. For everyone else, a quieter species in a flat is kindness to the bird as much as to the street. And when a settled Amazona does hit a screaming patch, you can put a follow-up question to Kinny inside KinsLe about that dawn-and-evening pattern — he answers using material drawn from KinsLe Answers.