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Eulogy for a Parrot: Ningauble Nandayus Nenday

Posted in Bruce Byfield, conures, death, death-watch, exotic birds, grief, mourning, nandays, Ningauble, Parrots, Personal, pets, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Today, my nanday conure Ninguable died, surviving his mate Sophie by just under thirteen months. He died in my hands. It was the last act in a relationship that had lasted twenty-eight years.

He had been listless for the past couple of days, but yesterday evening he had seemed to rally. However, the improvement didn’t last, and this morning he was lying on his back when I opened his cage. I thought him dead, and although he roused feebly, I knew he wouldn’t last out the day.

I had no means to euthanize him, and taking him to the vet would only make his last hours uncomfortable, so I sat with him through the day. He seemed to have suffered a stroke, because he struggled to move his left leg, growing testy at times.. Sometimes, he yawned with his beak tilted up. He didn’t show any signs of pain, just frustration. I was just putting him on to a towel in his cage bottom, so I could use the computer with one hand while stroking him with the other, when he collapsed beak first and twisted sideways.

For a moment, I swear I saw a light in his brown eyes. Then he was gone. I waited a few moments, but I knew what was left was no longer him. The time was shortly before 2PM.

Ning was our first parrot, and responsible for most of the others coming into our lives. We had been fascinated by a friend’s dwarf macaw, and had spent over a month looking for our own small parrot. We briefly considered a blue-crowned conure at the Lougheed Mall pet store, but debated if it was quite right. Then we saw Ning at the store in Kingsgate Mall, and immediately knew he was right for us.

Had we known what we knew a few years later, we probably wouldn’t have bought him. He was missing a nail on one foot, and part of a toe on another – a likely sign that he was wild caught, and had had his feet tangled in a net. Plus the store owner swore he was eighteen months old when by his markings he was under a year. Later, we realized he had probably been smuggled into the country, an abusive practice that we wouldn’t have wanted to support.

But he was so feisty among all the much larger birds in the room, hanging from the bars of his cage and trying to attract the attention of the red lory who was the only bird of his size. We put a deposit on him, and stopped on our way to the Vancouver Folk Festival to feed him cherries and grapes, all of which he greedily devoured.

On Trish’s birthday, we brought him home. We left him to acclimatize while we went out to dinner, but we were both so excited that we could hardly eat. We named him Ningauble, after the ever-curious wizard in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series.

In the next few weeks, I worked with several times a day in the spare room, teaching him to climb up on a presented perch, then on a finger, feeding him and praising him loudly as a reward.

In the evenings, I would take him out and herd him on to my shoulder, where he would sit nervously before starting off. He couldn’t fly much, because we had clipped his wings, but that didn’t slow him much. He would glide as far as he could, and resolutely trudge along the floor and up the furniture until he reached his cage.

One evening, we were sitting reading when he reached over and gently preened my hair. Between my nervousness that he would bite my ear and my delight at this sign of trust, I hardly dared to move. But the next evening, he preened one side of my hair followed by the back, careful not to miss a spot, before giving up.

He seemed relieved to realize finally that he wasn’t responsible for all my hair, and after a few more evenings, settled down to a token preen in return for having his ear holes and neck scratched. He would sit and preen me for a couple of hours, then waddle down the couch to Trish to give her a couple of hours of attention.

I was in grad school at the time, and used to work in the spare room we had converted into a library. For a while, I used to take Ning into the library, since he would scream for me if I left him in the living room. Unfortunately, he would not only wander the shelves flinging books off, but also produce what our local used bookseller called parroted editions that had been thoroughly chewed to the point where they were unsellable.

After a couple of years, we decided he needed a mate, so we brought home Sophie, a malnourished, abused bird. Our plans to quarantine her for a month were immediately overturned when the only way to keep them from calling from room to room was to introduce them. Under our anxious eye, Ning jumped into Sophie’s cage and immediately started regurgitating to her.

If Sophie could talk, I swear she would have said, “Excuse me, sir? Have we been introduced?” but they immediately became inseparable, eventually going on to produce six chicks, one of whom is still with me, and one who returned to us before dying at a young age from the second hand smoke in a home where he briefly lived.

Ning wasn’t that skilled at feeding babies. But he kept Sophie fed while she was brooding, and delighted in teaching them the basics when they left the nest. At that point, Sophie was glad to pass along the responsibility, and Ning always pined when the babies went to other homes.

Because of the trouble and heartbreak of finding new homes for the babies, we eventually stopped allowing eggs to hatch. But Ning and Sophie didn’t seem unduly troubled. They continued in happy monogamy, with Ning in the adventurous lead and Sophie chirping nervously behind, but following him – on to the floor, or up on my shoulder, where they would sit preening each other and occasionally me while I worked on the computer.

In between, Ning would have territorial wars with the other male birds housed in the living room, always with the psychological edge. Although not particularly large for a nanday, his electric blue and green feathers showed he was the epitome of health. And, anyway, he was the cock with the hen.

He also showed an uncanny ability to find what unsettled his rivals the most at the least risk to him – for instance, sitting just inside another male’s territory on the floor, in a spot where he couldn’t be dive bombed.

And so things went on, the living room full of bird calls, affection and avian macho, until I got into the habit of thinking they might go on forever. But Trish sickened and died, and, five months later, Sophie died. Ning responded by a fit of macho, rampaging around the dining table until it was clear that this previously neutral ground was now his. He was also inclined to mope unless he spent as much time as possible with me – something I didn’t mind in the least, considering we were widowers together.

In the mornings, when I came to open the curtains, he would greet the sound of my voice with a liquid trill that would continue for up to a minute — one of the most beautiful sounds I ever heard, and one I wish now that I had got around to recording.

Despite his increasing age, Ning showed few signs of slowing down until the last four months of his life. One day, waddling over the carpet, he stopped and began biting furiously at his right wing. When I picked him up, I could find no damage, but he never flew far again. Instead, he would call anxiously to me, squirming until I picked him up and carried him to where he wanted to be. By this time, I could guess his destination with almost total accuracy.

I had seen similar signs in Sophie, but, considering Ning’s better health, I had hopes that his senior years would be prolonged. Until a few days ago, I even had hopes that with therapy he might fly freely again, since several times he managed short flights when frustrated.

As I write, it’s six hours after his death. I’ve taken his body to be cremated, and removed his cage from the living room – and I still keep looking for him as I type. He’s the one who taught me that parrots had sentience and limited planning abilities. He’s the one who kept me amused with his unabashed enthusiasm, and supported me with a preen and by hanging out when I was discouraged or grieving. He’s the one who taught me that parrots can purr.

Given all this, what could I do but sit with him in his final hours? I talked to him about our years together, sang him his favorite silly songs, and repeated my pet names for him. I cried over the inevitable before it happened and I hoped for a miracle, knowing I wouldn’t get one.

And you know what? I’m not ashamed of any of it. Because those are the sort of things you do for a friend. The only shame would have been to leave him to die alone, and my only comfort is that I did for him what I could.

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Eulogy for a parrot: Sophia J. Bandersnatch

Posted in Bruce Byfield, death, grief, mourning, nandays, Parrots, Personal, pets, Sophia J. Bandersnatch, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on December 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

“In the West End of Derby lives a working man
He says, ‘I can’t fly but me pigeons can
And when I set them free
It’s just like part of me
Gets lifted up on shining wings’”
– “Charlie and the King of Rome”

This morning when I took the cover off the cage, my parrot Sophy was lying on one side, with her mate Ning hovering over her. She didn’t open her eyes, and her breathing was labored. I scooped her up and put her on the table, and she barely opened her eyes. I knew then that she was dying, so I decided that cleaning the cages would wait.

Sophy had been in a convalescence cage for the last few days after she slipped from a perch and started favoring her left leg. But her appetite was healthy and she was otherwise acting normally; the convalescence cage was just so she wouldn’t climb until her leg was better. Last night when I put her and Ning to bed, she was moving better, and I was cautiously optimistic that she was healing.

But she was thirty years old – old for her species — and had been growing quieter over the last year, so her condition this morning was not a total surprise. I debated taking her to the vet, and decided she was better at home, where she could be in the company of her flock when she died. Besides, the way she looked, I was not sure she would live long enough to arrive at the vet, or that the vet could do anything I couldn’t.

So I sat there as the sun rose, scratching her ear and trying to fed her corn. She refused the corn, and the loving regurgitation of Ning. In fact, she seemed to have trouble waking at all.

When the sun poured into the living room, I stood with her for a while so she could bask in the light, something she would do for hours, given a chance. The sun on her feathers roused her, but only a little. I placed her back on the table and continued waiting, scratching her neck feathers.

A few minutes later, she shifted her head awkwardly once or twice, as though trying to get comfortable. The eye that I could see grew misty. She seemed to stiffen, and all at once she had stopped breathing. Ning prodded her with his beak, and, when she did not respond, moved a body’s length away, preening himself with an air of apprehension.

That was the end of my twenty-four year relationship with Sophia J. (for Jabberwock) Bandersnatch. It was an end that I could hardly have predicted from the start.

When we bought Sophy from the bird-sitter, she had been neglected and abused for several years. She had no tail-feathers, and she had plucked her breast. Recognizing her as a nanday conure was so hard that we almost had to take the fact on faith.

We were told that she had locked in a cage for at least three years, and fed only on sunflower seeds. When she made a noise, a hand or a thrown boot hit the side of her cage. The only noise she could make was an outraged squawk.

Under these conditions, what could we do? If ever a bird needed rescuing, it was Sophy. When the bird-sitter reported back to her original owner that we found that she had a sweet personality, his reply was, “Sophy has a personality?” – more proof, if we had needed any, that he had no idea how to care for her.

When we brought her home, we placed her in the spare room, thinking to quarantine her for a month before introducing her to Ning. But the two birds started calling so excitedly that after a couple of hours, we brought Ning in for a visit.

We were ready to supervise, but there was no need. Ning leaped down off my shoulder and sidled up to her on the perch and immediately started regurgitating. Sophy made a stifled sound of surprise, as though to say, “Excuse me, sir, but have we been introduced?” but her objections could not have been too serious. Moments later, they were mating.

After that, Sophy and Ning were nearly inseparable, eating, bathing, playing with chew toys, climbing up on me. Always, in season and out, they mated, even on my shoulder. If one of them strayed more than the width of the living room, the other would start making anxious squawks. Ning was the more independent and aggressive of the two, but we soon noticed that anything Sophy wanted, she got. In anything she cared about, she was the dominant bird.

With Ning as her companion, Sophy blossomed and started to accept us. She would go everywhere with him, even occasionally down on the floor, which she obviously regarded as a dangerous place. I remember the two of them constantly worrying a small tin back and forth as though playing football.

One time, she crawled into one of Trish’s boots that was lying flat on the floor. She made an inquisitive cheep and, frightened by the echo, retreated squawking.

Over the next couple of years, her feathers grew in. But she remained an over-zealous preener, so that her feathers often looked ragged and you could see the gray of her down on her breast.

A few years later, she was healthy enough that she started laying eggs. The first one surprised her as much as it did us. She kept looking behind her at the egg, as if she could not quite believe that she had produced it.

Other eggs followed – so many at first, that she became egg-bound had to visit the vet just after Christmas. Ning moped around, and, early on New Years’ Day, we took him to pick her up. His rapturous purr as he started preening her in the examination room was as true a sign of devotion as you could see anywhere.

We bought a nest box, and watched her excavate the peat moss that lined it to her liking. Soon, eggs and hatchlings followed – Frumious (because what else should a Bandersnatch produce?), Jabberwock, and Rambunctious, Rogue and Rapscallion, and Madrigal, all born in the living room. Sophy would spend hours cooing over her hatchlings, over-preening them but caring for them fastidiously until they were weaned. Once they were eating for themselves, they were Ning’s concern for a few months so far as she was concerned, and she always seemed relieved when her offspring left for new homes.

A flock, a mate, and babies mellowed Sophy immensely. She never was much for hands after her previous experience, but she came to trust us enough that she would simply press her beak firmly around an encroaching finger, instead of drawing blood.

We knew that she trusted us, because every morning, she would lean from the top of the cage to preen our faces, more gently than any parrot I have ever met. She was the only bird I trusted to preen my eyes, because even a sudden noise would not excite her into nipping me. When I lowered a shoulder, she would scramble across the cage, careless of any obstacles, to climb up on me.

She would sit for hours on my shoulder, with or without Ning, as I worked at the computer. Sometimes, I would sing silly songs to her, and she would shake her tall and fluff out contentedly just at the corner of my vision.

I could go on and on – but I see that I already have. But I can hardly remember a time that her playful and loving presence was not part of my home life. All the birds were a comfort to me in the weeks after my wife died, but she was the one who sat with me the most, and seemed most sensitive to my grief. In return, remembering her sitting contentedly on one leg on the back of the cage, I like to think that we helped her put the years of abuse and neglect behind her.

As I type, Ning is restless, hopping from my shoulder to the table to the floor, and flying up to the cage. He keeps looking around as though expecting to see her, and is unable to keep still.

Without any anthropomorphizing whatsoever, I know exactly how he feels. Even after watching her die, I still can’t believe that gallant little Sophy is gone.

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The choice to preen

Posted in Bruce Byfield, nandays, Parrots, Personal, pets, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 1, 2010| Leave a Comment »

After four years, our parrot Beau has changed his behavior. In the last month, he’s started seeking us out to preen us.

If you know nothing about parrots, you probably don’t realize what a milestone that is. It’s not the same as a cat enjoying having its stomach scratched, or a dog licking your face. Cats and dogs can learn to enjoy interacting with humans in these ways, but these are not the behaviors of mature animals. They are the behaviors of very young animals that cats and dogs have kept because they are rewarded for them, and because they are pleasurable.

By contrast, parrots of all ages preen – not just their mates or their young, but other parrots in the flock as well. Partly, exchanging preens is a necessity, because, like many birds, parrots have places they just can’t reach themselves, such as behind the head and under the beak. Moreover, feather cases growing in can be uncomfortable.

But, just as importantly, preening is an important part of the complex, ever-shifting relationships in a flock. Who preens who (and in what order) can be a matter of status as well as trust. A parrot needs to preen and be preened almost as much as he or she needs water and varied food. For a parrot, preening is not just an indulgence; denied this social interaction, a parrot is unhappy and often despondent.

All this is true at any time, but it is even truer when a parrot chooses to preen a human. Parrots raised among humans may reach the necessary level of trust quicker than a wild parrot, but even a hand-fed one does not have the long history of domestication than a cat or a dog has. Even today, most domestic parrots are no more than a few generations removed from the wild. They are not creatures selected over centuries for subservience to humans.

Parrots that preen a human may be desperate for interaction, but they are still choosing to trust. Equal to equal, they are expressing friendship.

For these reasons, a preen by a parrot is not anything that you can take for granted. But it is especially touching in a neglected parrot like Beau, particularly since he has taken so long to reach this stage. We adopted Beau four years ago from the Greyhaven Exotic Bird Sanctuary, and he arrived in our house with baggage. He may have lost a mate, and he had apparently spent several years exiled to a laundry room, with only the sound of the washing machine and dryer for company. He may have been in mourning when he arrived in our house (parrots do mourn), and he was definitely seriously under-socialized.

When not crazed by his own hormones in the spring, in the past, Beau would accept a brief neck scratch, and sometimes a tickle under his wing, but, until now, he has not been much interested in returning the favor.

Now, he is preening with a persistence and enthusiasm that he never had before. If a hand is nearby, he will start preening between fingers or knuckles. If an arm is nearby, he will start on the arm hairs. But what he seems to like best is to scurry up a shoulder and preen hair and cheeks for minutes at a time.

As a veteran of decades of bird preens, I can tell he is tentative. But mostly he is eager, almost as though making up for lost time. His preening can be a little nerve-wracking, because ears tend to get him so excited that he bites, but gradually he is learning the rules, just as I am learning to relax under his ministrations.

Despite my nervousness, I feel honored by the change. I always do, but, in this case, I also take the preening as a sign that his rehabilitation is nearly complete. Like many parrots, Beau may never completely recover from being abused, but at least now we know for sure that he has made progress to a more normal life, and is comfortable in his new surroundings.

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11 myths about parrots and their care

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Parrots, Personal, pets, Uncategorized on December 30, 2008| 6 Comments »

Humans have been keeping parrots for thousands of years. Unfortunately, though, most of what the average person thinks they know about parrots is incomplete, inaccurate, or just plain wrong. The result of this ignorance is often the mistreatment of birds, made all the sadder (but no less serious) because it is unintentional.
In the hopes of helping people to avoid mistreatment through ignorance, here are 10 common errors about parrots:

  • Parrots are tropical birds: It’s true that many parrots live in the tropics. However, just as members of the corvidae (blackbirds, crows, and ravens) have filled every ecological niche in the northern hemisphere, the psitaccines (parrots) have filled every niche in the southern hemisphere. In other words, you’ll find parrots in temperate zones and even above the snow line in the foothills of the Andes and the Himalayas, not just in warmer climates.
  • All parrots talk: Some parrots pick up words on their own, but, behind every parrot with a large vocabulary is a human who has spent hundreds of hours helping the bird to learn. Nobody can guarantee that a parrot will talk, although you can increase the chances by choosing the species and a bird with talking parents and patient early trainers. However, many of the most lovable parrots I have met don’t talk at all, and, in general, talking ability should be the least important reason for buying a parrot.
  • Parrots don’t understand what you are saying: Despite the use of the verb “to parrot” to mean “to repeat without understanding,” the work of Irene Pepperberg shows that parrots have an intelligence and language-using ability that borders on the lower edges of humanity’s.
  • Parrots lack expression: Just because a parrots’ face is dominated by a large beak doesn’t mean that they are hard to read. Like most social animals, they have complex body language that expresses a variety of moods and reactions. Observe or ask around, and you’ll have no trouble understanding how a parrot is responding.
  • Parrots require less attention than dogs or cats: In fact, the opposite is true: Most parrots are intensely social, and require much more attention than most pets. Confining a parrot to a cage all the time is actually a form of abuse, even if the SPCA doesn’t recognize it as such.
  • Parrots are dirty: In fact, parrots are as fastidiousness as cats. They will spend hours cleaning and grooming their feathers into the proper position. And, given half a chance, most will learn to relieve themselves in one particular area. Generally, whenever you see a dirty bird, you are seeing the result of improper treatment.
  • Keeping a parrot in a cage is cruel: All parrots are very territorial, and, as adults, will have their private space. In the wild, that space is usually a nest. But, for domestic parrots, that space is often a cage, or includes it. So long as a parrot can come and go for large parts of the day, providing a cage is not only far from cruel but also essential for a bird’s mental health.
  • Parrots only eat seed: Seed can be an important part of a parrots’ diet. However, to stay healthy and live a long life, parrots also need fresh fruit and vegetables. These days, several types of pellets exist to give them the proper nutrition, but you should probably vary pellets with other foods, if only to give the birds some variety. After all, no matter how much you love lasagna, you probably don’t want to eat it every day for three meals a day.
  • When a parrot reaches for you with his or her beak, it’s going to bite you: Well, sometimes. But parrots also use their beak to help them climb, and their tongues to taste a human or other bird as a tentative gesture of trust. The trick is to learn parrot body language so that you know what the bird reaching for you intends and how you should respond. Otherwise, you may get a bite simply because a bird is responding to your nervousness in kind.
  • Parrots mix well with other animals: Some parrots get along well with other animals. However, others do not. The truth is, you should never let different species interact unsupervised, because one species may not understand the other’s body language. If you do, you are risking injury and trauma to one or more animals – and not always to the parrot; more than one cat has learned the hard way that a beak is a deadly weapon.
  • Parrots can live to be over a hundred years old: A parrot’s life expectancy depends on the species. Some macaws are known to have lived into their eighties, while a cockatoo at the San Diego Zoo was over 100 and blind when it died. Other parrots seem to live 40-70 years. However, very little research has been done on the subject, and we don’t know much about parrot life spans, except to say that, properly cared-for domestic birds probably live an average of twice as long as their wild counterparts.

There is much more that you can learn about parrots, but a great deal of that is learnable only over years. However, if you remember these debunkings, you will at least not have to unlearn very much before you start to understand parrots.

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Styles of affection in parrots

Posted in birdwatching, Bruce Byfield, conures, nandays, Parrots, pets, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 20, 2008| 1 Comment »

Few animals or birds are as affectionate as parrots. Mostly living in flocks, they are intensely social, so much so that interaction is intensely important to them – so much so that an ignored parrot is an abused parrot. Next to the average parrot, a cat is an ascetic, and a dog is a treacherous turncoat who will betray you at every chance. Yet, being highly intelligent as well, each parrot demonstrates affection in their own way.

Our own Nanday conures illustrate a variety of preferences. Ning, our oldest cock, was once a studious preener. When he first accepted us, he would gently preen every square centimeter of my hair, then march down the couch to preen Trish’s. However, when he became the mate of Sophie, he showed less interest in preening us, although he still tries to preen our mouths. But his preference is to stand beak beneath a human nose, making kissing noises, for as long as we will let him. When I am doing my couch potato imitation, his preference is to tuck himself against the side of my jaw, making a purring noise like a miniature green refrigerator. You always know when he is set on preening, because he swaggers over with an arrogant determination to get the affection that he wants. He likes a quick scratch under the chin or over his ear holes, but never for more than about a minute.

By contrast, Ning’s mate Sophy is more standoffish. She was an abused bird when we bought her, and has never learned to trust hands completely. To this day, she only enjoys a preen so long as she is turned away and doesn’t officially notice it. Instead, her preference is to do the preening herself. She will preen a motionless hand or arm for twenty minutes at a stretch. She also enjoys preening a face, especially around the eyes, having perfected a delicate preening that makes her the only one of us our birds whose beak we would trust so close to our eyes.

Rambunctious, our crippled cock who was handfed as a baby, is the exact opposite of Sophy. Where Sophy is standoffish, Ram will fly anywhere, anytime to one of us so he can sit on a shoulder, cheeping happily away as if telling a long and rambling story. Once I stop moving, he will belly up to a neck and start preening the side of my face. If he comes across me lying down, his greatest joy is to roll on his side in the middle of my chest, with my hand cupped over him. He will stay that way for forty minutes, given the opportunity, and has been known to fall asleep in that position.

Seeing Beaudin, the youngest cock, strut up and down and make harsh cockatiel squawks, you would never believe that he had an appetite for affection. But, the truth is, he is the most affection-hungry bird in our house. Possibly, he doesn’t quite believe that he has a permanent home. Or perhaps, as we suspect, he is a handfed bird like Ram. But, whatever the reason, he has an endless appetite for interaction with us. He likes to sidle up against the palm of a hand, and be scratched endlessly almost anywhere. Under the beak, over the ear, on the neck, under the wing – it’s all the same to him, so long as the preening is constant. A few minutes of this treatment, and he goes so limp that he seems boneless, rolling on his side and gently nibbling any nearby fingers.

Much of this behavior seems based on their experiences in the nest. For instance, it is easy to guess that a nose hovering above them to an accompaniment of clucking sounds reminds them of when they were just hatched, and a beak was hovering over them protectively. But, whatever, the reason, all our birds seem endlessly preoccupied with giving and receiving affect. Even Ning and Sophy, who are rarely more than a meter away from each other, welcome the chance to preen one of us given any encouragement whatsoever. Their affectionate nature is one of the main reasons why parrots remain my pet of choice.

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The first preen from a parrot

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Parrots, Personal, pets, Uncategorized on June 11, 2007| 2 Comments »

Unlike cats and dogs, parrots are still wild animals. Although the CITES treaties have all but eliminated the export of wild birds, even now, few parrots are more than three or four generations removed from the wild. That fact alone means that getting a bird to accept you is very different from training most domestic animals. You don’t tame a parrot, or enforce more than temporary obedience. Rather, you reach a point where a bird decides to trust you.

My first experience with such trust came with Ning, our first bird. I had been training him to step up on a stick and my hand, and he was learning, but it was a matter of persistence on my part more than anything else. To any unabused parrot, status is always negotiable, and, while Ning obeyed, nips to show his distaste for the exercise were not exactly unknown.

Then, one night, I was lying on the couch with Ning on my hand, when he suddenly looked as though he had made a decision and started waddling determinedly up my arm. Although Ning is a nanday conure, and not the largest of parrots, I was nervous as he touched the side of my head with his beak — as Diana Paxson once said to me, anybody with a five hundred drill press on their face automatically commands respect.

But instead of attacking me, he started delicately preening my sideburns. He spent the next twenty minutes on that side of my head, then moved on to the back. At one point, he paused to give me a desperate look, as if to say he hadn’t realized how large I was, but he kept on before giving up halfway through the second side of my head

The next night, he did it again. The night after that, when he was finished with me, he marched along the back of the couch to Trish and did the same to her. That’s when I knew that we were solid.

Since then, I’ve experience the first preen from a parrot many times. At times, it is a delicate preen of the eyelids, as it was with Sophy, the only bird I trust to do that. At others, as with poor abused Jabberwock, it was a gentle preening of my forelock, followed by sitting, nose to beak for minutes at a time. With fledglings, it’s combined with the strangely boneless slump of a content and perfectly trusting parrot. Last year, the first preen came from Beaudin, our latest rescue.

The whole experience is very much like earning the trust of a two year old child — and, if you think that sentimental, take a moment to search out Irene Pepperberg’s work with African Grays like Alex: parrots really do have the intelligence of a young child, and that clearly makes them sentient beings.

Perhaps that is what makes the trust of a parrot so special to me. Far more than with a dog or a cat – who are semi-sentient, but not in a parrot’s class — it is a trust based on an evaluation of my trustworthiness. I’ve experienced that moment many time in my life, and it always leaves me excited, humbled, and more than a little honored.

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A dictionary of parrot sounds

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Parrots, pets, Uncategorized on June 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »

In one of his early books, Samuel R. Delany uses the phrase “as expressionless as a macaw.” Delany is a talented writer and critic, but, I’ve never quite trusted him after reading that unobservant phrase. Having lived for years with nanday conures, a kind of small South American parrot, I can tell you that the last thing any sort of parrot can be described as is expressionless.

Here’s a list (in no particular order) of the most common noises I’ve heard from the nandays who are slowly chewing our living room to pieces:

  • Drinking: A trill that sounds like falling water, and shows deep appreciation.
  • Thank you: A single chirp ending on an upbeat, used when a bird has just been given something.
  • Greeting: A noise similar to a thank-you, but longer and more drawn out. Used when seeing another friendly bird or human, and when stepping up on a human’s hand or arm.
  • Mutual preening: A sound halfway been been a chirp and a trill.
  • Mild annoyance: A chirp mixed with a trill.
  • Extreme annoyance: An outraged squawk, higher-pitched than usual. Unfortunately, it says a lot about the state of human-parrot relations that this is the sound that many people most often associate with parrots of any species.
  • About to regurgitate (a sign of affection): A husky cough made in the throat.
  • Content: A cooing noise, usually accompanied by fluffed feathers and a bonelessly limp attitude.
  • Content and sheltered: A purr that sounds like a cat, or maybe a noisy refrigerator.
  • Pleased excitement: A chuckling noise. Often, I’m afraid, a sign that a bird is doing something that we humans would object to, like chewing the wooden furniture.
  • Looking for flock: A moderate scream consisting of one or two notes endless repeated until answered. Even birds that don’t like each other will make this noise if they don’t see each other.
  • Alarm: A steady scream that continues until either the danger is gone or all birds are convinced that no danger exists.
  • Curious: A single chirp, rising at the end, almost like a question mark.
  • Curious and Fearful: Like the curious chirp except shorter and abruptly cut off.
  • Bathing: A loud noise halfway between a coo and squawk, made not only by the bird that’s bathing, but all the birds in the flock.
  • Sex: A noise that sounds like a rusty water pump being cranked, getting gradually faster. Interestingly, mated pairs often twist so that they can look directly at each other during sex, a behavior that some people have claimed is unique to humans.
  • Brief Outrage: A sound halfway between a squawk and a cough. May be followed by an attempt to bite, depending on the bird. For others, making the sound is enough.
  • Prolonged Outrage: An extremely energetic, high-pitched scream with few pauses. All Nandays have a strong sense of self and entitlement, so this sound can be triggered by putting them in their cages or giving one bird something and forgetting to give the equivalent to another.
  • Fear and alarm: A high-pitched, full-volume scream that goes on and on with pauses for breaths. Most often used when a strange bird or human comes within a few meters. Often accompanied by much puffing up and stalking up and down, especially by the cocks.
  • Eating: An excited single chirp, often repeated.
  • Panting: A noise made only when they are too hot. A sign that they need to be moved from where they are, and given water or even a bowl to bathe in so that they can cool off.

This list is nowhere near complete. For instance, I have left out a kissing noise which several of our birds make because it is a sign of affection that they’ve learned from humans. Nor am I entirely sure about whether some of these sounds are unique to the birds that I’ve known.

Also, most birds, I’ve observed, have one or two vocalizations unique to them. For example, our parrot Jabberwock, who spent some time in the wild, must have sheltered among pigeons, since he would make the same sound as pigeons make whenever he took to the air. Similarly, Ning, our eldest male has a combination trill and chuckle that he only makes when he is playfully stalking bare toes in a series of small leaps and bounds. And Beaudin, our newest bird, makes cockatiel sounds because he once hung out with one.

But, for all these limitations, these examples are enough to show the range of vocalizations that birds can make. And I haven’t even gone fully into the body language and behaviors that extend this range of communications.

No wonder, though, that the larger parrots are some of the best talkers outside of humanity. Many are social species, and they’re used to vocallizing at length and in great detail.

“As expressionless as a macaw.” Sure, Delany. What were you thinking?

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Rescuing parrots

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Parrots, Personal, pets, Uncategorized on April 22, 2007| 2 Comments »

I never planned to be a rescuer of parrots. Yet, in a small way, that’s what Ive been for much of my adult life.

I first became fascinated by parrots when I met Coquette, a yellow nape dwarf macaw owned by a couple in Seattle. What intrigued me about Coquette was her sentience. It was obviously so much greater than even the most intelligent dogs and cats I’d kept or met throughout my life. Years later, I read Irene Pepperberg’s papers on Alex and African Greys, which prove that at least some parrots have problem-solving abilities comparable to a six year old child’s, but, even on first meeting Coquette, I knew that I wasn’t just being anthropomorphic. She had a sense of self, and of humor, too.

Both were a revelation. I’d always thought that a parrot just sat in a cage and squawked. I didn’t know that they romped, and preened, or purred when happy.

Besides, a dog or cat seemed impractical in our townhouse. After a few visits with Coquette, whom we grew to like better than her owners, we started looking for our own parrot, deciding early on that,while we couldn’t afford a macaw, a conure would have much the same personality, and need less space as well. We contemplated a blue-crown conure, of the sort seen in the movie Paulie, then found a young nanday in another pet store. He was completely wild, but, within two weeks, he was marching back and forth between us on the couch so that he could preen us. We called him Ningauble, after a wizard in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series.

In those days, before the CITES treaty prevent the importation of wild birds, hundreds of birds were being dumped on the North American pet market every year. Many of these birds had been seized from the nest when young and malnourished and maltreated. Many had died before arriving in North America. Ning, we realized to our horror, was one of the lucky ones, having permanently lost a claw on each foot, but being otherwise healthy. We felt we owed him a life as close as possible to the one he would have lived in the wild.

Part of that life, we decided, would be a mate. However, we were also growing increasingly reluctant to deal with pet shops, so we had to wait a couple of years for the right opportunity. Our bird sitter told us of a nanday that she thought was a hen, who needed rescuing, and we went to see her.

If anything, the birdsitter had understated the case. The hen had been in a tiny, ramshackle cage, and overpreened herself badly. She had plucked her entire front bald, and her eye rings were black instead of white – a sure sign of malnutrition in nandays, we had discovered. When we took her from the cage for a closer look, she fluttered to the floor, and her tail feathers fell out at the gentlest of touches. The only sound she knew had to make was an outraged squawk, although parrots are among the most expressive of birds, with a wide range of sounds. We almost had to take the fact that she was a nanday on faith, she was in such poor condition. We later learned that she had been fed exclusively on a diet of sunflower seeds, and had had shoes thrown on her cage when she made a noise.

We took her home on trial, putting her in the spare room. But Ning made such excited attempts to communicate that after a couple of days, we decided to make introductions. Nng instantly started regurgitating to her, and she looked surprised and pleased. Within moments, they had become a couple.

The hen’s name was Sophie, which seemed not at all a parrot’s name – something more grandiloquent and silly seemed more appropriate. But she responded to the name, so we tarted it up by dubbing her Sophie J. Bandersnatch (the “J” being for Jabberwock).

Following this name choice, when Sophie and Ning started producing chicks, naturally their firstborn was named Frumious and the secondborn Jabberwock. The third in the clutch was Rambunctious Honorious Blunderbuss (“Ram” for short). In other clutches, Rogue and Rapscallion and Madigral followed.

Having parrots hatch in our living room was exciting, but also heartbreaking. Despite our best efforts to select caring buyers and give them advice, we didn’t always find good homes for Ning and Sophie’s offspring. Many people don’t realize the commitment of time and attention that having a parrot represents, and we soon hear that several of the offspring had been already passed to their second owners before they were a year old. We tried to help, but the only thing that would have worked for sure was to keep them all at home, and we had neither the room nor time for that.

One of the offspring we could help directly was Jabberwock. Somehow, he was let loose in the wild – we think deliberately. But he was recaptured and we heard about it, knowing him by his two albino claws. When we found he was in a home of heavy smokers who didn’t know what to do with him, what could we do except buy him back? But he was no longer the affectionate bird who had left our house. He remained a timid bird for the rest of his life, and died young of a lung tumor that was almost certainly caused by the smoke he had been forced to breath in his temporary owners’ home.

Another of Sophie and Ning’s chicks had problems, too. Ram had a leg injury in the nest, so we pulled him from the nest to hand-feed him. For a few weeks, the effort was harrowing, since he needed feeding every few hours, but he grew into a sturdy cripple and a strong flier. After all that effort, of course there was no way we would sell him. He started hanging out with Jabberwock, and, in the last years before Jabberwock’s death, became his preening partner.

After Jabberwock died, we started looking for another companion for Ram. Through the Greyhaven Exotic Bird Sanctuary, we heard of Beaudin, a nanday who had been confined for several years to a laundry room and who had recently lost his mate and a cockatiel companion. Last year, after an adoption process that included a home visit by Greyhaven officials, we brought him home, and he has thrived wonderfully, proving the smartest of our birds by far, especially in the matter of lifting the latch on his cage and finding other ways to escape.

We don’t have room for more than four birds, so future rescues are unlikely, but we continue to contribute to Greyhaven and other parrot rescue societies. Humans have power over animals, and, the fact that many people abuse that power is one of the distressing facts of our species. And parrots feel that abuse even worse than dogs or cats, because human ignorance adds to their distress. So we feel we have to do something.

Of course, had we known then what we know now about the pet bird industry, we would never have bought Ning. However, had we never bought Ning, we never would have been in the position to help other birds, so I can only hope that our karma balances.

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