The Birds of Pandemonium

by Michele Raffin

  The Birds of

  Pandemonium

  Life Among the Exotic

  and the Endangered

  MICHELE RAFFIN

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2014

  For Nick, Jason, Ross, and Lizzy

  Contents

  PREFACE The Tao of Oscar, Architect Finch

  ONE Morning at Pandemonium

  TWO One Dove Leads to Another, and Another . . .

  THREE Bird Fever: One More Is No Big Deal

  FOUR Do You Speak Bird?

  FIVE It Was Raining Birds

  SIX Amigo: A Bird and His Boy

  SEVEN Wing and Coffee: Crowned Glories

  PHOTOGRAPHS

  EIGHT Let’s Have Babies

  NINE Mail-Order Bride

  TEN Tico: The Bird Lady Gets Schooled

  ELEVEN Hello, Pretty Mama

  TWELVE The Flock in Peril: Mice, Men, and Microbes

  THIRTEEN Let’s Get Serious

  FOURTEEN Blessed Events

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PREFACE

  The Tao of Oscar, Architect Finch

  I’m a sucker for free stuff, so when a friend told me about a big birdcage sitting by the side of the road with a sign tied to it that read FREE AVIARY, FREE BIRD, INQUIRE WITHIN, I hustled right over to have a look. I was just starting out on the avian adventure that inspired this book, and any added cage space was welcome. I didn’t need another bird for our backyard sanctuary at that point, but since this one came with serious real estate, there was surely room for one more, whatever the species.

  The cage was big, clunky, and homemade, about six feet across and five feet tall. I stood on the sidewalk considering: if I were to attach it to the converted shed I used as an aviary for zebra finches, it would be like adding a covered porch where the birds could get sunlight and feel the breeze.

  A warm and friendly woman answered the door. She seemed delighted that I was willing to haul away the cumbersome cage. She went off to fetch the “free bird” incentive.

  He was an absolutely gorgeous finch with a shiny ebony head, a forest-green back, and a vibrant purple chest—a Lady Gouldian finch, she told me. They are stunning little five-inch birds native to Australia, with vivid jewel-toned colorings from green to purple to gold. Since the Academy Awards ceremony was airing in a few hours, I decided to name him Oscar. Maneuvering the cage home with a truck and two helpers was so difficult and time consuming that I had to return the following morning to pick up the bird.

  I knocked at the door. This time, the friendly woman did not even show her face. Instead, a pair of hands reached out the door, holding a cardboard box, which was taped tightly shut and had a few air holes poked in the lid. The suddenly reclusive donor shut the door abruptly as I was thanking her. As soon as I got home, I opened the box. Oscar? Even to my untrained eye, I could tell this wasn’t the same bird I’d been shown the night before. This finch looked as if he’d gone through a few dozen rinse and spin cycles. All the color had been wrung out of his feathers. His head was gray, his back was faded green, and his breast looked like a white tuxedo shirt that had yellowed with age. But his eyes were bright and he looked directly at me, unafraid. Clearly, the nice lady had pulled the old bait and switch.

  I had planned to put the original Oscar in our finch aviary, but this bedraggled, woebegone specimen needed some close observation. I put him in my office in a wooden hospital cage that I keep for emergencies. He ate well and seemed healthy, but he was quiet and inactive. Most finches are lively and ceaseless explorers. Oscar was more interested in watching me as I moved around the office. After three weeks of observation, I concluded that he was probably healthy and that his inactivity could be due to loneliness. Finches are flock birds. They need like-feathered company.

  One sunny morning, I released Oscar into the aviary inhabited by a dozen zebra finches, gregarious little red-beaked birds with distinctive black-and-white striping. As I had hoped, Oscar became animated once he was in their company. He hopped around the aviary floor, exploring every inch. The zebra finches landed one by one, looked him over, and accepted him on the spot. I checked on Oscar several times during the day. Now that he had company, he became a gregarious, energetic flock member. That changed at nighttime: When the zebra finches flew up to the highest perches to roost, Oscar didn’t join them. He spent that evening and the next on the floor, huddled on top of the seed dish in the corner.

  Was he being bullied? At dusk, I lurked out of sight near the aviary to try to identify the culprit. All thirteen finches ate their dinner with gusto and preened their side and back feathers. Then one by one they flew to the high perches until only Oscar was left on the ground. He flapped his wings over and over and over again. He could achieve liftoff but was able to rise only an inch or two off the ground before falling back down. He tried and tried until exhaustion forced him to stop. Oscar hopped slowly to the corner seed dish, tucked his head under his wings, and fell asleep.

  I admired his moxie, but a flightless bird can be vulnerable—fatally so. Handicapped birds usually don’t survive very long, even in a protected aviary. Either they are harassed by other birds or they succumb to disease because they are usually confined to the floor, which is the dirtiest part of an aviary. I considered transferring him back to an inside cage, but he clearly needed company. I’d just have to get him off the ground.

  I decided to improvise a low corner perch made from a bamboo gardening stake. When I walked into the aviary to work on it, the zebras panicked and flew up to the highest roosts. Oscar calmly stood his ground and watched. I threaded the bamboo stake through the wire holes on one side of the cage corner and prepared to cut it to the proper size. Oscar hopped up on the perch before I had fastened the other end. Now what?

  Oscar showed no fear as we sat next to each other. He stayed firmly seated on the makeshift perch, so I decided to leave it in place. I put another piece of bamboo through the wires in order to get another measurement, but before I pulled it out, Oscar had hopped upward to this second perch. By then he was about five inches off the ground. Instead of looking at me, his gaze had swiveled two inches up, to a point in the wire where he could reach another perch—if some slow-witted human placed it there right away.

  I realized what Oscar had in mind. I had brought several stakes of different diameters and lengths with me, and I ended up using them all. Quickly we developed a routine: Oscar would gaze fixedly at the optimal spot, and I’d put another stake there, a couple of inches up from the last. We continued building a ladder together, with a few delays owing to human error. Sometimes I placed a perch a bit too high for him to reach. Oscar would try, but when he failed to make the distance, he would settle on the perch below and stare at the right spot until I corrected my mistake.

  I ran out of stakes a couple of feet from the aviary’s highest perches. Oscar spent one more night on the ground, and the following morning I came back with more wooden dowels. We repeated our routine: Oscar would direct me with his stare, I would add the next rung, and he would test-hop to it. It took twenty-eight perches to build Oscar’s ladder, but when it was finished, he was able to access some of the highest roosting places in the aviary. Every trip up and down took stamina and patience, but Oscar was game.

  Over the months, the drab little castaway flourished. By the end of the next molting season, Oscar had grown a glossy new set of feathers. I had hoped that better feathering would enable him to fly, but it did not. He continued to use his ladder to get to perches when he wanted to take a nap or retire for the night. The zebra finches treated Oscar as a full member of their flock. They were equally accepting of Gail, a middle-aged female Lady Gou
ldian finch whom I adopted from a local humane society. Gail had languished there because her head was bald and she was not desired as a pet. One handsome, flightless suitor didn’t think this detracted from her appeal.

  I didn’t provide nest boxes for the finches, since I normally don’t let rescued birds breed; there are too many unknowns, such as the reason for Oscar’s disability. But Oscar and Gail outsmarted me. They managed to put together a straw nest inside a decorative ceramic gourd that I’d hung from the aviary ceiling. Their love shack was right next to the highest rung on Oscar’s ladder. Oscar and Gail produced five radiant babies. All could fly and all had fully feathered heads.

  In the end, Oscar proved to be the resourceful architect of his own destiny. The pair’s strong drive to reproduce was also propitious. In a backyard aviary that would eventually turn its focus toward the conservation of endangered bird species, these two were way ahead of the game.

  Lady Gouldian finches were first discovered in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century by the ornithological artist John Gould, who named them after his wife, Elizabeth. Living in flocks, the birds are nomadic dwellers that move through tropical savannas, depending on the availability of food and water. By 1992, a species population once estimated in the millions had dwindled to a mere twenty-five hundred; such a steep decline qualified Lady Gouldians as endangered in the wild. In Australia, many thousands are being raised in captivity, but despite conservation efforts, their wild population continues to decrease as they are beset by new diseases and large, destructive fires in their native forests.

  Though he was the first of his species to land here, Oscar now lives in a large flock of Lady Gouldians on our property; some of them are his offspring. He remains a genial, hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy. When breakfast is served, Oscar is one of the first birds at the communal dish. He especially likes hard-boiled eggs. Instead of quietly nibbling from the edges of the bowl, like some of the shier birds, Oscar jumps straight into the middle of it. Within seconds he is usually joined by so many others that it looks like an avian mosh pit. At night he sleeps huddled between two of his flock mates on a perch that is almost seven feet off the ground. Sleeping position is a status symbol within some species. The more powerful birds get the higher, safer spots; others range up (or down) in order of importance. Oscar’s spot is a couple of rungs below the highest perching branch—not bad for a flock member who can’t even fly.

  I’m sure that Oscar’s former owner had no clue what a tiny dynamo she pawned off in that sealed box. Oscar is a planner, a good citizen, and most of all a gifted trans-species communicator. He told me exactly what he needed to stay alive and well. His calm, determined gumption has also been an inspiration for me as I have navigated the closed, nearly all-male society of exotic-bird breeders who made it clear when I started out that there was little room on their lofty perch for a novice female aviculturist.

  There were also few manuals on caring for these birds. I realized early on that I would largely have to teach myself the knowledge to care for and breed exotic species; it would come slowly, with a lot of improvisation. When I enrolled in a course on egg incubation at SeaWorld, San Diego I met an instructor and Curator of Birds at the Los Angeles Zoo named Susie Kasielke, who helps restore endangered California condors to the wild. As we discussed their captive breeding program for those giant birds, she told me frankly, “We’re trying to reproduce the results; we can’t reproduce the process.”

  That gave me some comfort. I can’t give my birds the conditions they have in the wild, but I can help them have a future for their species and provide a good, fulfilled, enriched, and natural life. I do much of that by experimenting, and I embrace the serendipity that brings hurt, endangered, and abandoned creatures my way. At bottom, I’ve adopted the “can do” tao of Oscar: whatever works.

  More than anything, Oscar still helps me appreciate the wit, resilience, and wisdom of birds. His bright, fixed stare is a constructive reminder: Pay attention. Look hard; listen better. We’ll all be better off. Now, the Lady Gouldian aviary is so active and full that it’s sometimes hard to find Oscar in the frantic morning scrum around the food bowl. That’s as it should be, and I am so glad. The giveaway cage that first lured me proved to be too damaged and clunky to use. It was worthless and we junked it. But Oscar, the flightless, one-ounce treasure, is a keeper.

  ONE

  Morning at Pandemonium

  I rise every morning just after 4:00 a.m.—gladly on most days—and pad as silently as possible across the terra-cotta-tiled floors of our home. If I make the smallest sound as I pass by the dining room, they might hear. I don’t want to set off our resident clown posse—not yet.

  “Hello? Want out! I love you!”

  Darn. Shana is awake. I ignore her squawky blandishments, and she tries harder.

  “Pretty mama, pretty mama. I love you!”

  I smile to myself and wait her out. Finally, silence returns. As I finish a mug of tea and an hour of administrative work in my office, dawn flares over the foothills of the Santa Cruz range to our west. Every morning at first light, I step outside into the bewitching bird music that heralds another day at Pandemonium Aviaries, the home and bird sanctuary that I share with my family, two donkeys, a pair of goats, a collie, a sheepdog, one understandably aloof elder cat, and some of the world’s most remarkable birds.

  Ours is a global birdsong. As I stand on the deck, the morning music begins with a few tentative peeps and soft trills until a full symphony swells from the most vocal of over three hundred avian throats representing over forty species. It knocks me out, every day.

  “Whooo, whooo.” The Guinea turacos greet the first rays of sun and preen their bright green plumage. They look like Vegas showgirls, with exaggerated white eyeliner and extravagant plumes atop their heads. “Whooo.”

  Beneath their fluting I can hear the contrapuntal coos of our male ringneck doves as they begin another day of relentless courting, bowing to their lady loves between notes. We also have bleeding-heart doves, Australian crested doves, emerald doves, Senegal doves, and crested quail-doves.

  Now Olivia and Ferguson, a pair of majestic East African crowned cranes, are stretching white-tipped wings that span six feet. Electrifying crowns of gold filaments flare from black tufts atop their heads; their eyes, set in a black mask above crimson cheeks, are a piercing cobalt hue. The cranes’ low, loud call travels far through the misty hills here. It’s the primal sound of morning in the Lake Victoria basin of East Africa, ever fainter there as those habitats grow more perilous for the cranes.

  The big birds’ trumpeting has roused the rainbow lorikeets, an antic Australian parrot family of mom, dad, and three babies splashed with gaudy primary colors. They pop up groggily from their nesting box, then snap into their frenetic punk-rock personae, screeching, “Harli! Harli! Harli!” as they pogo up and down on their perches.

  They’re all housed in a sprawling complex of cupolas, turrets, and tropical-hued mosaic-trimmed cages. Pandemonium is a nonprofit focused on saving bird species from extinction through conservation and education. We began as a place where rescued birds could live out their lives without ever having to be moved again. As a rescue organization we could save individual birds, but when we made the transition to conservation breeding, our mission became saving species. In a short time, with primarily volunteer staffing, we have assembled some of the largest flocks of certain rare and exotic species in the world, right in our backyard.

  Some of our birds are in far more peril than others. During the morning serenade, I always listen closely for an eerie sonic boom that sends a deep tympanic roll beneath the reedy melodies. Until I hear it, I wonder: Are they awake? Are they okay?

  “Booooooom.” There they are. “Boom, boom, boooom.”

  Early on, I developed a hopeless infatuation with our vivid blue Victoria crowned pigeons, and I fret about them constantly. They are native to New Guinea and they are the largest pigeon species in the world. At a foot and a h
alf, they are just a bit smaller than their extinct forebears from Mauritius, the dodoes. The Victoria crowneds’ lacy head plumage looks like a headdress of delicate blue snowflakes fanned above vivid red eyes. At times, they bob their blue-gray fan-shaped tails rhythmically as they vocalize the species’ quieter call. It’s much like a hum. Some visitors have likened it to a cell phone set on vibrate. For me, the sound whispers of the ancestral, fog-bathed tropical forests of New Guinea. Ours is the second-largest flock of Victoria crowned under conservation in the world. We have grown it bird by bird with our own hatchlings and acquisitions from breeders and zoos. All our birds were bred half a world away from the habitats where their wild ancestors were first trapped or netted and sent off in shipping crates to the United States. Many millions of wild birds have died during capture or in transit—collateral damage in the exotic-creature trade.

  We never accept illegally wild-caught birds, but we work hard to ensure the survival of birds who are already in the United States and their offspring. Someday, if we can raise healthy new flocks, these birds may be repatriated to those faraway forests—what’s left of them. For now, we aim to keep the species alive, well, and safely reproducing.

  The Victoria crowned pigeons, their close relatives blue crowned pigeons, Nicobar pigeons, and the green-naped pheasant pigeons, also from New Guinea, are Pandemonium’s main breeding focus. New Guinea is home to the third-largest rain forest in the world. An alarming amount of forest on the huge island has been destroyed, much of it slashed and cleared for palm plantations. Growers are rushing to produce more red palm oil, praised as a carotene-rich “diet miracle” by manufacturers and Web and TV health gurus. There are already plantations producing red palm oil sustainably in countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, and Liberia, as well as in parts of New Guinea. Conservationists have campaigned to identify these responsible vendors on packaging labels, but the habitat encroachment continues at an alarming rate.