Kathy believes Rickie has what she calls “little angel wings,” and it’s hard to disagree. “My whole family did a lot of praying about the kind of dog I was going to get,” she recalls. “I was really blessed to find him; he is special. I believe it was arranged that I could have him.”
This evening, Rickie also works his magic on Mark Sanchez, who is just a year old and not much bigger than the dog. Mark enters the lobby with his grandparents, Maria and Ramon, to visit his great-grandfather. The family lives in Guadalupe, one of the poorest neighborhoods among Phoenix’s sprawling desert communities. Mark is so excited to see Rickie, who sits up, gravely inviting him to hug, that he dances on the tiptoes of his new sneakers.
“He had a little Chihuahua, and two weeks ago, big dogs attacked it and killed it,” says his grandmother. “They are usually chained up but they escape. He named him Rufus, and he asks for him. And Mama tells him Rufus is bye-bye.”
Mark crushes Rickie to his purple football jersey, jiggles him, and pats him with so little control that it verges on the violent. Rickie, in his green bandana, tolerates this with his usual wide-eyed calm. To a boy who has lost a puppy, this small pet is a balm, if only for the moment.
“With animals, it’s true, unconditional love,” says Kathy, squatting down on the linoleum to watch Rickie and Mark. “If you have a bad day, they don’t care. They don’t care what you look like. They are happy. It’s just neat.”
Rickie is not just a hug on four legs; he’s a pretext for conversation or a warm moment in otherwise uneventful lives. “I like to watch the interaction between people and animals,” Kathy says. “With a lot of the people we visit, you get some conversations about the dog and about pets they’ve had. That’s good because it gets their mind off of things going on.”
The things going on too often include dying, says Kathy. “We visit people for years, and the next time we come they are not there,” she says. “It’s some relief for them, for what they were going through, a lot of pain.” She pauses, “And you miss them too.”
But while they are here, Rickie and Kathy provide a measure of happy distraction for those they visit.
“Rickie gets their mind off things, even if it’s for ten or fifteen minutes,” says Kathy. “When you hear somebody say, ‘I’ve been waiting for you all week; you are the best thing that happened to me all week,’ it makes you want to do it more. You see you really are doing something that makes a difference.”
Angel, an injured umbrella cockatoo, wears a prosthetic beak.
22
EILEEN FLYING
EILEEN MCCARTHY AND MIDWEST AVIAN ADOPTION & RESCUE SERVICES
WHAT PEOPLE SHOULD know before they get an exotic bird, according to Eileen McCarthy, is this: it’s like having a three-year-old with a sharp object you can never take away. And this child—who is tireless and has a voice like a siren when provoked—requires room to run fifteen to twenty miles a day. He has special needs. And he lives for thirty-five to eighty years.
In other words, for most humans, keeping an exotic bird captive is a very bad idea. But that has not stopped thousands of people a year from buying birds, only to find out just how difficult it is, and then abandoning them at a humane society, an animal shelter, or worse.
Eileen is the founder of The Landing, an exotic-bird shelter in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, the country’s largest shelter in terms of number of birds, and on this afternoon, it sounds like it. The decibel level inside the three-room store-front is piercing: finches beep and cheep; dozens of cockatiels, macaws, lorries, conures, lovebirds, and parakeets chirp, whistle, and shriek; and at the top of the racket are raw, furious yells from a bossy, blind cockatoo named Sam who wants only to be petted—interminably. “RAAAAAACK!” hollers Sam in a raw, angry tenor that rises above the chorus.
Eileen is statuesque with burnished mahogany red ringlets and ivory skin. A Celtic bird tattoo of her own design circles her right bicep. Silver lizard earrings dangle above the shoulders of her black T-shirt, four silver rings gleam on her toes, and a tattoo of pastel baby elephants parading trunk-to-tail decorates her left ankle. She arrives toting a couple of her own pets: Abby, a green Quaker parrot, and Mango, a sun conure the color of a blood orange, ride on a perch in a ventilated black mesh backpack.
“Hello, Papa,” says Abby.
“Abby started this whole thing,” says Eileen, freeing the pair to waddle and flutter around her office. “He came from a person who didn’t want him, and he was a little monster, yelling and biting. But I didn’t know that. I thought it’s just a little bird; how hard can it be?”
“What’s up?” says Abby.
“Now I know,” says Eileen.
Since the shelter opened in 1999, Eileen, her sister, Jamie McCarthy, and volunteers have cared for fourteen hundred unwanted, abused birds. Behind their streetside office are two rooms warmed by low-hanging, full-spectrum lights. In the first room, half the residents are cockatiels, finches, and parakeets with medical problems or that are not tame or whose mates have medical problems. The other side of the room is home to “the sweet guys,” says Eileen, birds that are immediately adoptable.
“People don’t come here to adopt little guys, but they are great talkers. A parakeet holds the world’s record for bird vocabulary—two thousand words,” she says, moving through her rainbow-hued aviary. “Cockatiels, parakeets, and lovebirds are throwaway pets to some people, because they are inexpensive and they are impulse purchases.”
Eileen releases a pair of bright-scarlet lories to rove the room: Amelia, a female chattering lory, swoops onto my shoulder, whispers nonsense in a crackling, demonic voice, then nips painfully at my ear and snatches at the corner of my lips. Rasta, a male black-capped lory, lands in my hair, gnaws on my ponytail holder, and refuses to be dislodged.
“I think I begin to understand Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds,” I say, appealing to Eileen for help. “Yes, the more time I spend around birds, the more frightening that movie is,” she says, laughing.
In each room of this suburban aviary, large cages are bright with toys and perches, Popsicle sticks and toilet-paper tubes (for chewing), spiral ropes, bells, hollow balls, leather wreaths, and debarked branches—veritable playgrounds for birds. Eileen threads her fingers through the toys into cages where birds with beaks like wire cutters eye her.
“Step up,” she says, opening cages and offering her hand. “Talk to me,” she says, and “Wanna snuggle?” and “Oh, come on now, be gentle.”
“My childhood dream was to be like Doctor Doolittle, to talk to the animals and to figure out what they are saying,” says Eileen. “The first animals I was aware of as a kid were elephants. When I saw how they suffered, I stopped going to the zoo and the circus. I’m a bit of a crusader, maybe it’s the Irish in me. The Irish have to be against something!”
Her first cockatiel died prematurely, and a second one flew away, so Eileen set herself a moratorium: “No more birds until I do it right.” The need for rescue that she saw as a member of a bird club inspired her to organize something on a larger scale, and Midwest Avian Adoption & Rescue Services (MAARS) was formed. “When I started MAARS, I thought it would be more effective to work on felony provisions in the state animal anticruelty statute. But it doesn’t have the same rewards as when you make a direct impact on an animal’s life. It’s emotionally harder, but I like making a tangible difference right now—not waiting years and years for people to get a clue and get legislation passed.”
The problem with tropical birds is, well, people, says Eileen. “People don’t understand: these are wild birds even if they have been raised in captivity. The stores that sell them don’t have knowledgeable staff, or they don’t care. Here are sweet, docile, cute, and dependent baby birds, but they mature and have minds of their own and become challenging, and wild behaviors surface. Birds have the intelligence of a two- to five-year-old child, a special toddler that is never going to grow up. People are completely unprepared for that. One of th
e most common statements from those who surrender birds is, ‘If I had known then what I know now, I never would have gotten a bird.’”
Tropical birds are now covered by the Animal Welfare Act, and the United States Department of Agriculture has jurisdiction over birds not used in food or research, and regulates standards for keeping birds in captivity. But for most birds, Eileen explains, anything we provide is woefully inadequate. “A macaw in nature flies twenty miles a day, so what should be a minimum size for an enclosure?” she says. “They are lucky if they get a cage twice their wingspan in every direction.”
“Hi, Zac! Now just be gentle,” she greets a flaming scarlet macaw with a tail more than a foot long. “He’s only two and a half. He’s been naughty with me. It’s not natural for them to bite. In the wild, they are prey, and their defense is to fly away. But he loves Jamie, my sister.”
“Hey, Bogie,” she says, opening the next cage, where a demure white bird sits. “She’s an eleven-year-old bare-eyed cockatoo from North Carolina. She’s here because her owner’s husband got colon cancer. Her boyfriend is Chief.” And Eileen opens the door on the adjacent cage, where a bulkier cockatoo perches, his crest fanned up and forward over his face. Bogie clambers up to him and begins to preen his wings.
“Chief likes young women, the younger the better,” says Eileen. “When twelve- to fourteen-year-old girls are here, they are his favorite. We don’t know how he knows age, but we think macaws have terrific vision, and possibly he can see age differences that way.”
Bogie sets to work humbly nibbling Chief’s forehead and neck. He sits regally, accepting this grooming as his due.
“Chief is wild caught, which is not legal anymore,” she says. “He caused us to take the position they should not be pets. He is so unhappy. When he first lived with my sis, Chief built nests for Jamie, was solicitous of her, and wanted her to come into the nest. He would be furious if she came home after dark.”
She opens the cage door for Malachi, a Moluccan cockatoo that has so severely pecked out his feathers from stress that his naked gray breast skin shivers visibly over tiny ribs. He doesn’t like to come out, but she opens the door anyway. “We don’t know his history, but the damage to the follicles is so bad the feathers won’t grow back,” she says as Malachi eyes her. “It’s like people with mental illness; the behavior becomes compulsive. They can’t stop.” Tiny doses of antidepressants have been used successfully to treat the compulsive behavior, she explains, but they are not effective in all cases.
Stress for birds can include neglect, loneliness, changes made that separate them from their flock, and lack of stimulation or social contact. They withdraw, they pout, they pluck and self-mutilate, they pace. They scream incessantly and shred their bedding and toys.
Zoe, a tiny Goffin cockatoo, was kept alone in a cellar for two years. She tore at herself, using her beak and claws to reach every feather except a few on her head. She lives at The Landing now, but her behavior continues, and she is skeletally skinny. Her bright black eyes alert and full of determination, she pads about on Eileen’s shoulder, nuzzling her ears and hair, chattering affectionately. Without feathers, she cannot fly and occasionally plummets to the floor, where she looks like an anorectic young chicken that somehow escaped from a roasting pan.
Some of Eileen’s other birds—many of the birds that have been kept in tiny cages—don’t know how to fly.
Andy, a male umbrella cockatoo, was neglected after his owner became pregnant, got married, and moved. He became lonely, then angry, and unlike mild Malachi, he turned his rage outward. “Open up!” he would demand.
“He was so aggressive, he was almost crazy,” says Eileen. “He would rattle the cage and scream and throw himself against the bars. When he realized he was going to get let out and paid attention to, he became the sweetest bird. Now I trust him more than any cockatoo we have.”
“Uh-oh,” says Zac, and Malachi barks like a dog.
Adoption costs for birds from The Landing range from twenty-five to five hundred dollars, depending on size, but the purchase price is the least of the obligation. “The best thing for a dog or cat is to be in a loving home, but for birds it’s not the best thing,” Eileen explains. “We need to work on preserving them in the wild. These are not pets; we can never meet their needs. You wouldn’t have a dolphin in your swimming pool or a panther in your living room—it is obvious to most people that it’s wrong. If you keep a dog in a little kennel twenty hours a day, that would be wrong, yet a bird in a cage is acceptable?”
Eldo, an umbrella cockatoo, went through four adoptive homes and was returned each time to The Landing because the people developed allergies to him—a common situation, Eileen explains, because of a natural powder that coats birds’ feathers.
“Hi, Sam.” She greets the blind bird that is padding comically flat-footed on a towel on the bottom of his cage.
“Pretty bird,” Sam says in a Popeye-the-Sailor voice.
“Yes, you are a pretty bird. Do you want to cuddle?”
“Hello, Sam,” says Sam.
Jamie arrives, a paler, younger version of her sister, and takes Zac into the office to play. She works in human resources at a major foods corporation and helps at The Landing many additional hours a week.
“Whatcha doin’?” says Abby.
Zac toddles around amiably on the floor, alternately allowing Jamie to pet him and flinging balls and a yellow stuffed bird around. He carefully tastes each of her fingers, running his black leathery tongue daintily from cuticle to tip, and she picks dander from his broad red brow.
“Mmmm, good,” says Abby.
“I have a special place for captive wild animals, and how they suffer angers me,” Eileen says. “We humans have the chance to go to a therapist; we have power to change things if we have that desire. No matter how much desire animals have to change their situation, they cannot. They are powerless. The Christian Right says we have dominion over animals. No, we have stewardship, and we’d better use it responsibly and with reverence for that animal.”
“When you see something that isn’t right, it’s your obligation to do something—that’s how we were raised by liberal, hippie parents,” she explains.
Thousands of people buy exotic birds only to discover how difficult they are and then abandon them, says Eileen McCarthy, founder of Midwest Avian Adoption & Rescue (MAARS) in Minneapolis.
Eileen is married, Jamie is single, and neither has children. They are exercising their own wings these days. “Our mom was emotionally dependent; we couldn’t separate from her and be free,” says Eileen. “When she died, it was freeing—I didn’t have to live for her too.”
“I find it so enraging the way people overlook birds. Birds have always been a symbol of freedom, yet we want to possess them, put them in cages, objectify them.” She knows this life firsthand, she says.
“I’ve struggled with many demons and disorders,” says Eileen, who prefers not to name them for fear she would be stereotyped. “I was the smart, pretty bird in a cage pulling out my feathers and knowing that something was terribly, fundamentally wrong with me and my world, yet helpless to make it all right. I was imprisoned by hideous flesh and the desperation and futility of easing my mother’s pain, and bearing it myself and suffocating from rage, fear, and loneliness. I was certain of only one thing—that I was meant to fly.”
When she chose to go into animal advocacy, she considered circus animals—elephants were her first love—and then dogs and cats. But she loves all creatures. “I went to see Jaws, and I cried when they shot the shark,” she recalls. “He was only doing what he was meant to do.”
And she made a conscious choice to enter the much less visible world of rare birds. “I could have chosen dogs and cats, and then if I wanted my life back, there are others who would take over. But with birds, there wouldn’t be anyone. They are extraterrestrial, not mammals, and they are so alien to us; that’s why I think they are so overlooked. There is such a huge disconnec
tion between people and birds. It’s why people abuse prisoners with hoods on or keep slaves—you can tell yourself they are different, so what you do to them doesn’t count. I identify, having been a little different myself.”
And then there is the return on the effort. According to the McCarthy sisters, love from a bird is not unconditional as it is with dogs, cats, and horses. They say, however, that the relationship can be much deeper than with mammals.
“It’s a very intense and more equal relationship than with a dog,” says Eileen. “Birds actually learn our language, and if you are a good owner, you learn theirs.”
“And don’t think they don’t know what they are saying,” says Jamie. “They really hold conversations with you. If you want to befriend a macaw, talk to them about themselves; it never fails. Chief nods his head appropriately when I tell stories about him.”
The birds also converse in human language with one another—at least in fragments, according to the sisters. Dmitri, a rescued blue-and-gold macaw, said “shut up” to the cockatoos. Other macaws at The Landing learned it and taught still more macaws to screech “shut up” and “knock it off” and “shut up, Bongo” to Bongo Bob, a cockatoo, and to a remodeling crew next door. And the cockatoos would scream back in voices meant to carry miles through the jungle. It sounded like a fight on a playground amplified through microphones. “You shut up!” “No, you shut up!” “No, you!”
As we walk around the aviary, Eileen continues to let birds out of cages, to stroke them and toss them gently toward their cages so they flap their wings. This is not just fun; it’s training: the sisters receive many birds that first learn to fly here.
“Fifteen years ago, I was exhausted and disgusted and started to believe that it would be easier just to surrender—to let go and let the dark emptiness devour me in eternal silence,” says Eileen. “But I hung on. Through my mother’s illness and death, I held on as tight as I could, so much that it hurt to breathe, until one day it all made sense. It was me all along; I was the key to unlock my cage. And I did. I opened the door, put one foot in front of the other, and I have never looked back.”
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