The Bluebird Effect

by Julie Zickefoose

  When fines and jail terms finally caught up with wild bird smugglers, trade in captive-bred baby parrots began to take off. Nestlings were close-banded, fitted with seamless aluminum rings that could be slipped only over the foot of a small nestling, to be worn for life as badges of their legal provenance.

  Having had a lifelong love for parrots, and being young and foolish and flush with a little money from my first real job, I became convinced that I needed a baby parrot. With the perspective of twenty-three years, having given birth to two children, I understand the root of that urge and why I unconsciously channeled it into a desire for a pet bird. I wasn’t married; I lived hand-to-mouth and moved every few months, but I needed something young and helpless to care for. I’d lost a treasured pet budgie to cancer after only three years, and I wanted a pet bird who would live a long, long time. Oh, be careful what you wish for.

  The problem with kittens is that they grow into cats. And the problem with baby parrots is that they grow into adult parrots. Baby parrots give quiet, nasal feeding calls; they bob their heads endearingly, fluttering pin-feathered wings. They snuggle and burrow into your arms, looking for warmth and comfort. They explore your face with soft, rubbery tongues. Their emerging feathers stand up in crazy, spiky wigs; their young beaks are still soft and weak, as yet unfit for rending and piercing. To a young, aspiring ornithologist, a baby parrot seemed like a rather pricey answer to a prayer.

  In my own defense, Charlie picked me. Known to the home breeder-dealer I dealt with as a rather insular and persnickety bird, Charlie wouldn’t warm up to just anyone. So when he eagerly leapt onto my wrist and swarmed up my neck to preen my hair and whisper in my ear, Charlie made an impression. “He loves you! He’s never done that with anybody!” It never occurred to me to wonder whether she told all prospective buyers the same thing.

  She told me that Charlie wasn’t for sale, because she wanted to keep him for breeding, if surgical sexing bore out her suspicion that Charlie was a female. Reluctantly, I peeled myself away from the small stub-tailed bundle of green and red feathers, but not before he attempted to copulate with my hand. “If this bird’s a female, I’ll eat my hat,” I told the dealer.

  Two weeks later, she called me. “I just had him surgically sexed. Charlie is a male! You can have him if you want him. He needs a really good home, and I know he loves you.” What she’d seen and noted was the nickel-size patch of bare skin on his abdomen that Charlie had already, at four and a half months of age, begun to pluck. To an experienced parrot handler, this bespoke an emotional sensitivity that could make him a poor pet prospect. He’d need a solicitous caretaker, lots of attention, a “really good home.”

  Were the dealer a Realtor and Charlie a home, she’d have described him as “loaded with potential.” He was a handful, a fixer-upper from the start. Blinded by parrot lust, I couldn’t wait to hand over a month’s pay and begin our life together. On his first vet check, it was apparent that Charlie had never been surgically sexed, a noninvasive procedure wherein a tiny incision is made near the lastrib and spine for a quick peek at the left gonad, be it testis or ovary. Doubt at the dealer’s honesty began to pluck at my psyche, but all that was moot. I had wanted this bird desperately. I had bonded with him. Charlie was mine now to love, feed, and care for.

  I fed him warm parrot chow from a spoon, let him burrow under the bedcovers, cuddled him in the evening, gave him exotic nuts to crack, a golf ball to roll around the living room. I cleaned up copious droppings and quickly decided it would be expedient to toilet-train him. I noticed that, when I approached his cage, he often defecated in excitement, so I began to give a simple command each time that occurred. When he complied, I’d immediately take him on my wrist as a reward. It didn’t take long for him to catch on. Before two days had passed, Charlie would defecate on command, and not on my shoulder. Even if he didn’t need to, he’d squeeze out a tiny dropping when asked. And he’d knock the back of my neck with his beak when he felt the need. I’d hold him over newspaper, wastebasket, even the toilet, and he’d release, sometimes having held back for an hour or two. To this day, he remembers both to defecate on command and to warn me with a knock or nip when he needs to relieve himself.

  I soon discovered that keeping this bird in the style to which he’d become accustomed took a bit of work. I prepared him a fresh fruit, vegetable, pasta, and rice breakfast every morning. He liked to eat whatever I was eating, including chicken, beef, fish, cheese, yogurt, eggs, toast, pasta, nuts, peanut butter, cake, cookies, dried fruit, and occasional sips of juice, beer, and wine. He often shared dinner with me, asking for bites of whatever I might be eating. He’d wave a chicken bone in his foot as he split it end to end, extracting the marrow. I’d read that wild parrots had been spotted feeding on carcasses, and Charlie seemed to know just what to do with bones. In those first months, parrot ownership was going pretty well. Never mind the three-square-foot cage that now dominated my tiny living room; forget the newspapers that covered key sections of the floor. Charlie was some parrot.

  When his wing feathers had fully grown in, Charlie began to fly around the cottage, and a not-very-subtle shift in his attitude became apparent. True to his bird nature, he favored high places—especially curtain rods and mantels—where he could knock knickknacks off shelves and chew woodwork. He began to nip, then to bite, and to take flight before I could return him to his cage. Taken outside, he’d feel a gust of wind and lift off for the tallest tree. As much as I hated to deface his sea blue wings, I was forced to clip his primary feathers or lose control of him altogether.

  I realize now that this is where the real trouble began. Released from the towel in which I’d wrapped him to commit the insult, he stared at his clipped wings in seeming amazement. And he commenced to shred the shafts of the cut feathers. This progressed to overpreening both wing and tail feathers, and the nickel-size spot of plucked feathers on his belly expanded to include the insides of his legs. Charlie wasn’t even a year old, still coming into adult plumage, and he was removing the feathers as fast as they grew in. From that day on, he never allowed a wing feather to fully emerge before chewing it off. I was distraught, knowing I’d done the wrong thing but helpless to reverse Charlie’s predilection. I showered him with attention, with flossy, fibrous toys, stuffed animals. He shredded them and kept working on his feathers, plucking even every emerging blood feather with a sharp “OW!”

  Self-mutilation is a common response to captivity in both birds and mammals. Look closely at older animals in some zoos and you’ll see bare patches on the forelegs where neurotic tongues have licked too often, missing toenails, bald patches where they’ve rubbed themselves raw on cage bars. There’s even a term for it: neurodermatitis.

  I couldn’t believe that Charlie, my constant companion, would be subject to sufficient emotional disturbance to result in feather plucking. I thought back to the bare patch I’d seen on his belly when he was a nestling, to the dealer’s allusion to his need for a “really good home.” He had the best environment, the best fresh food I could give him. Repeated tests by his avian veterinarian hinted at nothing organic as a cause for the mutilation. Charlie’s plucking seemed to be a response to myriad emotional and physical needs left unfulfilled in his highly artificial life with me. I would have to accept that fact, care for him, and love him as he was. Two decades later, he’s still plucking his belly, leg, and wing feathers, and he has two bare epaulets on his shoulders. I’m thankful he leaves as many feathers as he does; he still looks pretty good from the back. Feather plucking, two different avian veterinarians have assured me, is part of his psychic makeup, just as pacing and weaving seem to suit the captive bear and tiger. Just as captivity suits none of them.

  Parrots are vocal; some turn that aptitude into imitation of human speech. Charlie learned eight words, then ceased to pick up any more. Chestnut-fronted macaws aren’t known for talking, but they’re affectionate, funny, and personality-packed. They’re also aggressive as macaws go. Several bree
ders have told me that there are few birds as dangerous as territorial chestnut-fronted macaws. One man said he enters the aviary of his breeding pairs with a metal garbage can lid as a shield. The macaw researcher Charlie Munn, for whom my bird is named, reported that he saw a pair of wild chestnut-fronted macaws win a standoff over a nesting cavity with blue and yellow macaws four times their size.

  Like all parrots, chestnut-fronts are very, very loud. In the wild, parrots squawk and scream to maintain contact with their flocks. They fly fast, wings flicking shallowly, avian storm troopers, screaming all the way.

  In captivity, parrots scream to welcome human companions back home and to augment conversations with their own vocalizations. In my tiny Connecticut cottage, where I was alone in the living room–aviary for most of the day, Charlie chipped in whenever the phone rang. “Hellooo? Yeah!” he’d say when I picked up the receiver. From there, he’d escalate his conversation to deafening levels, and I had to shut myself in the back room to hear or be heard. I took to giving him toys and treats whenever the telephone rang, which helped keep him occupied but also rewarded the screaming behavior. Such was the tug o’ war, the coevolution, the clumsy daily merengue I danced with this bird.

  When I met my soon-to-be husband, in 1991, Charlie took an instant but not unexpected dislike to Bill. He’d sit on my knee, preening happily, then, a look of resolve crossing his face, climb methodically down, waddle across the room, climb up Bill’s leg, bite him sharply, and waddle back to me, his mission accomplished. Suggestions were made about finding a new home for this pretty tyrant. Charlie moved with me from Connecticut to Maryland, where Bill built him an enormous rope jungle gym, suspended from the rafters of my studio. Over time, we modified Charlie’s behavior by sequestering him whenever he bit Bill. If he was to get corn chips and the occasional sip of Heineken, he needed to play nicely. It’s been years since he’s bitten Bill. To this day, though, embracing in Charlie’s presence produces a salvo of screeches, raised feathers, and wickedly pinned pupils. He remains my bird, or, from Charlie’s perspective, I remain his person. It can be a drag to be owned by a macaw. It is also expensive.

  In order to continue cohabiting with such a creature, Bill and I had an eight-by-ten-foot aviary built onto my studio when we added on to our Ohio home in 1999. Sliding glass doors allow me to control Charlie’s enthusiasm for adding to our conversations or ruling on our social interactions. Having lived at the aural mercy of a parrot ensconced in the living room, I believe that anyone considering investing in a pet parrot should also plan to build it a separate room, handy to a busy part of the house, with sliding glass doors. The month’s pay I surrendered to buy Charlie in 1989 was a thin glaze of frost on an iceberg of investment made since, providing for our mutual welfare and sanity.

  Most birds are not particularly tactile creatures. Parrots are exceptions. Because they mate for life, they engage in complex social behaviors that help maintain the pair bond. Among these behaviors is allopreening, in which one member of the pair gently sorts through the other’s head feathers, removing feather sheaths. Parrot owners often provide allopreening for their pets, gently rolling emerging feathers between their fingers to remove the sheaths. Parrot and owner enjoy the exercise. Charlie enjoys having his head preened and the oil gland at the base of his tail massaged. He likes to cuddle up under my chin and nap. From his perch on my shoulder, he watches out the window for soaring raptors, giving voice to a low rattle when his sharp eyes discern one. To Charlie I owe three eagle sightings and a flabbergasted view of the only albino turkey vulture I’ve ever seen. I’ve often thought that a parrot would be a great asset at a hawk watch site, if it weren’t so traumatic for the predator-spotting bird.

  Being cavity nesters, parrots feel comfortable in dark, confined spaces. On cold days, Charlie dives down the front of my sweater or jacket and chuckles in the warm darkness. I have answered the door wearing Charlie like a joey in a kangaroo’s pouch, only to have him suddenly poke his head out at my collar, to the surprise and consternation of the delivery person who rang. The other side of this tactile nature is a nippy bossiness, which presents few problems when two wild parrots spar with their hard beaks and tough, scaled feet. Charlie’s perfectly capable of giving soft “play nips.” We play a game called Bite This, in which I offer my finger to him, saying, “Bite this!” With a loud growl and a great show of ferocity, he gives it the softest of nips, following it with a startled “OW!” and a cackle of laughter. It’s fun for both of us. Unfortunately, parrots in the grip of excitement lose the ability to calibrate their nips to vulnerable human flesh. Lacking shield-like beaks, people take the brunt of such passionate bites on tender lips, ears, and fingers. Living with a parrot is all about reading the lightning-fast changes of its moods and being aware of the potential releasers of aggression. It’s about trying not to get perforated.

  It took me nineteen years and innumerable bites before I learned a simple lesson: Charlie was most likely to bite me when there were strangers near his cage. It’s natural for a proud parrot owner to want to introduce guests to the bird, and that usually involves taking the parrot from the cage to the owner’s hand or shoulder. As often as not, this move results in aggression from the parrot, directed toward the bewildered owner. Over time, a parrot becomes protective of its territory (its cage) as well as its mate (the owner). Strangers crowding around a parrot’s territory and mate often evoke a violent response from the bird. It attempts to drive its partner away from perceived danger by striking with its beak. In the wild, such action would prevent its mate from pairing with another bird. In a captive situation, this natural psittacine behavior causes the owner to curse, flail her arms, grope for a tissue to stanch a bleeding lip, and make feeble excuses to shocked guests about her excitable, unsuitable, still thoroughly undomesticated pet.

  Charlie sits on my shoulder for much of every day, gently preening my hair, eyebrows, and ears. I kiss the soft white skin of his cheeks and play with him as if he were a tiny dog. He is preening on my shoulder as I proofread this manuscript, a beloved, calming presence, a fusty scent in my nostrils that I miss when I’m away from him. Yet Charlie has pierced my lower lip twice, and put countless deep, crescent-shaped holes in my hands and arms when strangers were present. He strikes like a snake, bringing the force of a beak that can crack Brazil nuts to bear on my vulnerable skin. After eighteen years of such mortifying incidents, I finally put a sign up in his aviary to remind me: NO KISSES NEAR CAGE! I now ask him to step on a long dowel when strangers are present—I don’t permit him to climb to my shoulder in such a charged situation. The embarrassing mateguarding bites have virtually ceased.

  Charlie’s a parrot. He’ll always bite, because parrots bite in a number of situations. They bite not because they’re inherently vicious but because biting is what they’d do in a similar situation in the wild. Biting works for parrots. Concern for the owner’s welfare, a consideration one expects and even demands from a pet dog, cannot be instilled in a parrot; it is not so much as a glimmer in the bird’s mind. Yes, there are parrots who imitate smoke detectors when they perceive a fire, saving the family from asphyxiation; there are parrots who scream their owners awake when burglars invade. But those birds likely still nail their owners with a bite when it suits them to do so. Even Alex, the celebrated African gray parrot with the astounding vocabulary and well-substantiated keen intellect, bit his beloved labmates. You’d think that a parrot who could count, distinguish colors, coin words, and murmur endearments might drop biting from his repertoire. But parrots seem to lack the capacity to override their powerful mate-protection instinct with anything resembling reason or empathy. The onus is on the parrot’s owner to figure out how to work around the natural behavior of the wild thing in her house.

  How many among us would keep a dog that tries to bite when its food dish is refilled, that lunges at us when we tidy up its bed? In the parrot’s mind, when we clean up after it and offer it food in its cup, we’re invading its territory. De
fense of territory and mate guarding are the two strongest instincts parrots possess, and they make life interesting for those of us who look after these birds. Such behaviors keep us on our toes. Charlie goes into breeding mode in January, and he can be downright dangerous for a month or more while his testosterone is flowing. People who keep the pet pact with parrots for their entire life spans are few and uniquely dedicated.

  Many pet parrots, quite understandably, wind up in foster homes and rescue organizations when their owners decide to have children. We look with new eyes at this wild pet when dimpled baby hands enter the picture. I’d had Charlie for nearly a decade when our daughter, Phoebe, was born, in 1996. His golden eyes nearly popped out of his head when he beheld our infant daughter for the first time. His beak fell open, and his rubbery black tongue wiggled.

  He sputtered in seeming astonishment, consumed with the desire to get closer to this writhing, reddish infant. Sorry, Charlie. Though I read no aggression in his eyes or posture, it would be a cold day in hell before he’d get close enough to touch or taste our new baby.

  As time went on, we worked around Charlie’s intense attraction to Phoebe, allowing him near her without having actual contact. She slept peacefully through his worst screaming bouts, having heard them in utero. Slowly it became apparent that Charlie’s interest in her was just that. Though jealousy is what parrots do best, he bore no malice toward the baby. By the time Phoebe was pulling up on the side of her playpen, Charlie was perching on its railing next to her, preening and cooing. As a toddler, she rolled him in her blanket and carried him in her arms like a doll. They giggled and played among the towels in the linen closet together, Charlie rushing out to defend his new companion from me. It was all fine with Charlie, and I was amazed at the bond they forged. That changed completely with Liam’s arrival, in 1999. Charlie’s focus shifted to the new infant, and he began chasing Phoebe with an unmistakably wicked look in his eye. I was distressed and mystified, but I shouldn’t have been. A conversation with the bird-keeper at a zoo in Victoria, Texas, made it all clear. She asked me a few questions.