‘He’s a character’: Meet Oliver, the very sociable parakeet at Java on Ocean in San Francisco

Walk into Java on Ocean coffeehouse in San Francisco, and it sounds a bit like an aviary. While an espresso machine hisses in the background, two canaries and a green singer finch chirp noisily from cages hung by a window looking out onto Faxon Avenue.

But the star of the show here is a fourth bird named Oliver, a 2-year-old parakeet who has been known to share a customer’s bagels, often plays happily (and fearlessly) with a cat named Zd, and who has twice flown off only to be discovered miraculously many miles away and returned to his perch in the coffeehouse.