“How long have you had Charlie?”
“Ten years.”
“Does he consider you his mate?”
“Well, he copulates with my foot, bosses me around, and attacks me when strangers are near, so I’d say yes.”
“When did he start acting aggressively toward Phoebe?”
“Right after Liam was born. How could he be so sweet to her for three years, and then turn on her?”
The aviculturist explained that, in all likelihood, Charlie considered both Liam and Phoebe to be his offspring. In parrot society, when the second brood hatches, it’s time to oust the fledglings from the first brood, to drive them from the home territory and encourage them to set up a place of their own. This allows the parent birds to focus their energy on the new nestlings. Charlie was genetically programmed to be a serial parent. Once again, his obvious affection for a person was eclipsed by his desire to maintain proper order in his parrotcentric world. Analyzed through a parrot’s unique point of view, everything Charlie did to guard his territory, mate, and putative offspring made perfect sense. The trick was keeping his psittacine perspective in the front of my mind, trying to make sense of his behavior toward us by divining the instinctual blueprint in his mind. Judging this engaging, sometimes dangerous creature by human standards, branding him “vicious” or “jealous,” would get us nowhere.
As Phoebe and Liam have grown up, Charlie has maintained a kind of détente with them, neither pursuing their affections nor discouraging them. They’re simply flockmates now. He’ll go out of his way to perch on the backs of their chairs; he’ll delicately take treats from their fingers; he’ll gladly accept a lift from Phoebe’s outstretched arm; but he allows only Bill and me to pet, preen, and touch him. Given the spectrum of behavior in older parrots, I feel grateful that Charlie is as tractable and pacific as he is.
To live with a parrot for twenty-three years is to develop an intricate understanding of and empathy with his unique plight—that of a monogamous, intensely social creature plunged into a world that makes no sense and does not fulfill his emotional needs. People reach into his sanctum sanctorum—his cage—to change papers or replenish food, continually annoying him. A parrot is frustrated by his human companion’s inattentiveness, her habit of leaving him alone for hours at a time. He screams to make contact, to call her back. He bites her to drive her away from potential rivals or enemies. He attacks her human mate, refusing to acknowledge his place in the flock. Everyone should know she belongs with the parrot, should be his constant companion, but no one seems to understand such a simple thing.
I have made peace with Charlie, because I love him and believe that the pact we forged in 1989, however star-crossed, is to be honored. Scanning parrot rescue websites, all of them flooded with rejected pets, I know I’m in a distinct minority. I stay away from pet stores, because I can’t bear to see the bright, dark eyes of the latest crop of hand-fed nestlings, knowing the life of misunderstanding, alienation, and loneliness most of them will face once they grow up to be parrots. I wonder how parrot breeders reconcile their proclaimed love for birds with the abysmal conditions to which they send so many of their hand-raised babies—a small cage in a back bedroom, where no one can hear their screams, passed from owner to owner via want ads. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of unwanted adult parrots languish, are put up for rescue and adoption, die alone. I can see no reason to keep breeding parrots for the pet industry, other than to support the industry. A prospective parrot owner will enjoy a year or two of its cuddly babyhood, with decade after decade of true parrothood—ear-piercingly loud, spectacularly messy, often uncuddly, and occasionally dangerous—to follow.
I hope for a collective awakening to the understanding that parrots can truly be parrots only in the wild, the kind of enlightenment that is slowly creeping in about chimpanzees, dolphins, and elephants. Highly intelligent, social, long-lived, and emotionally complex, parrots deserve so much better from us than solitary confinement. They belong with their flocks in the wild, where their numbers continue to dwindle. I can’t repatriate Charlie—old, flightless, and half-naked as he is—to the Peruvian Amazon, and neither do I have the forbearance to purchase another macaw to keep him company—logarithmically increasing the mess and noise of one. We’re stuck, the two of us, and ultimately all five of us, in a relationship that should never have been initiated. The dealer got her $750, and I, and then we, took on a lifetime commitment to living with a wild macaw in our house. Had I known what lay ahead, the tens of thousands of dollars we’d spend on specialized foods and equipment, on building a glassed room for him and paying a pet sitter to visit every day whenever we travel, I’d have set up an endowment fund before I purchased him.
I sometimes wonder if Charlie will outlive me, if I will have to hand him down to Phoebe or Liam. I don’t know where to put my thoughts about Charlie, because, like him, they don’t fit neatly under any particular heading. He’s not a pet, exactly; he’s a presence in my life, one that must be accommodated, tolerated, cleaned up after, worked around, provided for, and dearly loved; more like a quirky, crotchety relative who’s come to stay . . . for good. Yes, I got what I wished for in 1989, a pet bird who would live a long, long time.
Epilogue
CHARLIE SAVED his greatest secret for last. As this book went to press, my little green macaw entered a two-month period of frantic nesting behavior—backing into corners, throwing food from dishes, tearing stacks of newspapers and catalogues into bushels of confetti, possessed by a hormonal surge I’d never witnessed in twenty-three years. On a Monday evening, he shared a roast chicken dinner with us. Three hours later, Charlie was in great distress, straining to pass an enormous egg. I held my little hen macaw in my arms past midnight, then, before dawn, rushed her to an avian veterinarian three hours distant. Despite heroic efforts to save her, a massive infection had set in, and Charlie left us on August 9, 2011.
We’d built a sunny, climate-controlled room onto my studio just for Charlie. We were in it for the long haul: the loud screams, the thrown seed, and the chewed walls. And now I find that Charlie had built an annex on my heart. The studio is terribly quiet now—my shoulder aches for her familiar weight, my ear for her whispered confessions. But I won’t fill the void she left with another parrot. Charlie redefined “pet” for me. A pet, I’ve come to believe, is an animal whose emotional needs can be met by a human being. However much I loved her and tried to keep her engaged and happy, this little blue and green bundle of unmet needs was more inmate than pet, as are, I’d submit, all captive psittacines. Without mate and flock, without the joy of flight from flower to fruit to roost to nest, captive parrots are just marking time, time that felt at once too long and much too short to me.
I still can’t grasp that rowdy, swaggering Chuck was a hen the whole time, and I don’t miss the irony of a bird whisperer being taken in for two decades by a dealer’s lie and a little aberrant sexual behavior on Charlie’s part. What I miss is Charlie: loud, bossy, tender, funny Charles, dearly loved and, like all captive parrots, misunderstood to the end.
Notes
[>] studies in Michigan have shown: Michael P. Lombardo, Ruth M. Bosman, Christine A. Faro, Stephen G. Houtteman, and Timothy S. Kluisza, “Effect of Feathers as Nest Insulation on Incubation Behavior and Reproductive Performance of Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor),” Auk 112, no. 4 (1995): 973–981.
[>] “A little fool lies here”: In Otto Erich Deutsch, Mozart: A Documentary Biography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965).
[>] “the softest of beds”: Theodor Geisel, Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book (New York: Random House Books for Young Readers, 1962).
[>] fully 7 percent more birds survive: M. C. Brittingham and S. A. Temple, “Impacts of Supplemental Feeding on Survival Rates of Black-capped Chickadees,” Ecology 69 (1988): 581–589.
[>] case of suspected polygyny: T. M. Haggerty and E. S. Morton, “Carolina Wren (Thryothorus ludovicianus),” in The Birds of North America, no. 188,
ed. Alan F. Poole and Frank B. Gill (Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Sciences and Washington, D.C.: American Ornithologists’ Union, 1995), 8.
[>] fledging occurs around Day 20: T. R. Robinson, R. R. Sargent, and M. B. Sargent, “Ruby-throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris),” in The Birds of North America, no. 204, ed. Alan F. Poole and Frank B. Gill (Philadelphia: Academy of Natural Sciences and Washington, D.C.: American Ornithologists’ Union, 1996), 10.
[>] Ninety percent of the ospreys nesting: A. F. Poole, Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 209.
[>] R. C. Szaro observed adult ospreys: R. C. Szaro, “Reproductive Success and Foraging Behavior of the Osprey at Seahorse Key, Florida,” Wilson Bulletin 90 (1978): 112–118.
[>] he quotes the ethologist Donald Griffin: A. F. Poole. Ospreys: A Natural and Unnatural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 9. Poole is quoting ethologist Donald Griffin from his book Animal Thinking (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
[>] In the fall of 2004: Tom Baptist, personal correspondence with the author.
[>] a single chimney sweep has been known to kill: Paul Kyle and G. Kyle, “Environmental Tips for Homeowners and Professional Chimney Sweeps,” http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wild/birding/pif/chimney_swift/homeowners_sweeps/.
[>] showing that edible bird’s nest extract: Chao-Tan Guo, Tadanobu Takahashi, Wakoto Bukawa, Noriko Takahashi, Hirokazu Yagi, Koichi Kato, Kazuya I-P Jwa Hidari, Daisei Miyamoto, Takashi Suzuki, and Yasuo Suzuki, “Edible Bird’s Nest Extract Inhibits Influenza Virus Infection,” Antiviral Research 70, no. 3 (2006): 140–146.
[>] Experiments by Donald Kroodsma showed: Donald Kroodsma, The Singing Life of Birds (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005): 84–85.
[>] “Everyone knows . . . that the autumn”: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949).
[>] James Tanner’s elegant treatise: James T. Tanner, The Ivory-billed Woodpecker (1942; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003).
[>] “We, the woodpeckers”: James T. Tanner, unpublished MS, later published as “A Forest Alive,” Living Bird 24, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 37–41.
[>] “We didn’t know the ivorybill”: Richard M. Saunders, Carolina Quest (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1951).
[>] “She came trumpeting”: J. K. Terres, ed., Discovery: Great Moments in the Lives of Outstanding Naturalists (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1961).
[>] a book on the species: Jerome A. Jackson, In Search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004). Quote by Don Eckelberry.
[>] lowest recruitment rate of any bird: R. C. Drewien, W. M. Brown, and W. L. Kendall, “Recruitment in Rocky Mountain Greater Sandhill Cranes and Comparisons with Other Crane Populations,” Journal of Wildlife Management 59 (1995): 339–356.
[>] Over the two decades: Kammie L. Kruse, J. A. Dubovsky, and Thomas R. Cooper, “Status and Harvests of Sandhill Cranes: Mid-continent, Rocky Mountain, Lower Colorado River Valley and Eastern Populations 2011,” Administrative Report, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Denver, Colorado, 2011.
[>] it’s estimated that there are one hundred: Rex Sallabanks and Frances C. James, “American Robin (Turdus migratorius),” in The Birds of North America Online, ed. A. Poole (Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 1999).
[>] The researcher David Blockstein outlined: David E. Blockstein and D. Westmoreland, “Reproductive Strategy,” in Ecology and Management of the Mourning Dove, ed. T. S. Baskett, M. W. Sayre, R. E. Tomlinson, and R. E. Mirarchi (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1993), 105–116.
[>] According to the 1989 North American: S. Droege and J. R. Sauer. “North American Breeding Bird Survey Annual Summary 1989,” Biology Report 90, no. 8 (1990).
[>] A. C. Bent’s elegant: Arthur C. Bent, Life Histories of North American Cardinals, Grosbeaks, Buntings, Towhees, Finches, Sparrows, and Allies, U.S. National Museum Bulletin 237 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1968). Original Source: Arthur Cleveland Bent and collaborators (compiled and edited by Oliver L. Austin, Jr.), Smithsonian Institution United States National Museum Bulletin 237, Part 1 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1968) 1–15.
[>] Winter feeding has been shown: M. C. Brittingham and S. A. Temple, “Impacts of Supplemental Feeding on Survival Rates of Black-capped Chickadees,” Ecology 69 (1988): 581–589.
[>] Charles D. Duncan . . . looked at the precipitous drop: C. D. Duncan, “Changes in the Winter Abundance of Sharp-shinned Hawks in New England,” Journal of Field Ornithology 67 (1996): 254–262.
[>] “If a vulture has flown”: http://www.linsdomain.com/totems/pages/vulture.htm.
[>] “Vulture teaches the power”: http://www.starstuffs.com/native_spirituality/.
Index
albino animals, [>]–[>], [>], [>]
Allen, Arthur, [>]
alligator, [>]
All Things Considered (National Public Radio), [>], [>]
American Birds, [>]
American Ornithologists’ Union, [>]
“animal people,” [>]
Audubon. See National Audubon Society
Avery, Tex, [>]
aviaries, home:
bathtub, [>], [>];
glassed-in room, [>], [>];
living room as, for Charlie, [>], [>];
nylon-screen tent, [>], [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>];
rattan wastebasket, [>], [>], [>];
wood “chimney,” [>]
Avitrol, [>]–[>]
Baker, John, [>]
Baptist, Tom, [>]
Batt, Al, [>]
beetles, cerambycid, [>], [>], [>]
Bent, Arthur Cleveland, [>]
Bierregaard, Rob, [>]
bioaccumulation, [>]
bioconcentration, [>]
birds:
albino, [>]–[>], [>], [>];
banded, [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>];
cage represents security, [>];
care not to handle, [>];
causes of tameness, [>]–[>];
giving them names, [>];
illegal trade, [>]–[>];
illness (see disease and illness; parasites);
labeling technique, [>];
longer juvenile dependency of songbirds, [>];
rescue (see wildlife rehabilitation facilities; wildlife rehabilitators);
research collection and preservation, [>];
testosterone secretion in elderly females, [>];
threats to (see threats to birds);
tracking, [>], [>]–[>];
as unique individuals, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>], [>], [>];
vigilance training, [>]–[>], [>], [>]
The Birds (1963), [>]
Birds of North America, [>], [>], [>], [>], [>]
bird songs or bird calls, collections, [>], [>]
bird watchers:
emotional connection, [>], [>];
photographic equipment, [>]–[>];
responsibilities, [>];
tourism opportunities, [>]
Bird Watcher’s Digest:
the author’s works in, [>];
and Mr. Frock, [>];
overview of publication, [>], [>];
referrals for avian rehabilitators, [>];
turkey vulture in the company van, [>]
blackbird, red-winged, [>]
Blockstein, David, [>]
“bluebird effect,” [>]
bluebirds, eastern:
aggression from swallows, [>];
fecal sacs, [>];
national conservation efforts, [>]–[>];
nest, [>], [>]–[>];
nestlings, [>];
parental behavior, [>], [>]
“Mr. Troyer and family,” [>], [>], [>];
aggression from sparrows, [>];
arrival after hawk attack, [>], [>];
arrival of new male, [>];
bathing, [>], [>];
departur
e, [>]; development of trust, [>]–[>];
feeding in captivity, [>]–[>], [>];
feeding their young, [>];
during house construction, [>]–[>];
mating behavior and nesting, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>];
molting, [>]–[>];
reproduction, [>], [>]–[>]
Bodio, Stephen, [>]
Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Reserve, [>], [>]
Breeding Bird Survey. See North American Breeding Bird Survey
Brooks Bird Club, [>]
Burton, Donald, [>]
“butterfly effect,” [>]
cages. See aviaries, home
Campbell, Sylvan, [>]
capture technique, noose carpet, [>]
cardinals, northern, [>], [>], [>];
aggression, [>];
arrival, [>];
description, [>];
diet in the wild, [>], [>], [>];
effects of winter feeding, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>];
feeding in captivity, [>];
fledglings, [>], [>];
Meenah, [>];
nest, [>], [>]–[>], [>];
nestlings, [>], [>]–[>], [>];
predators, [>], [>];
The Bluebird Effect Page 26