I am a bird whisperer. A calmer. My best friends have been birds. Birds to me are children in feathered bodies, as soulful as any human, and then some. Because I am in love with these transcendent beings, I work with birds who have been traumatized or are in need of homes and I have been asked to adopt most of the birds I’ve rehabilitated. People do not understand that a bird is an astoundingly intelligent being who at the same time is much like a playful two year old who stays two for a very long time- many live to be over 80. I imagine that when we humans can learn to do no harm, we will have a chance of then evolving into birds—and I also think that whoever invented the idea of angels, must have known birds, for they are divine and playful and fabulous friends, as I imagine angels to be.)
Timmy and Misha…to be friends or not to be friends? Notice the slightly lifted crest, showing a bit of apprehension or excitement.
Timmy was a genius bird. He loved to eat the marrow in drumsticks, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit (that I might have been encouraging cannibalism) but he was already in such an un-natural situation that I tended to go to extremes to make him happy.
Before I went vegan, I once gave him a drumstick and he chewed to the marrow but when he got to the middle of the bone, it was too thick for him to crack. I watched him take a sliver of a branch and shape it to a point with his beak and then slip it into the middle of the bone, where he then pulled it out, covered with marrow, which he proceeded to eat.
He also loved picking locks. I only kept the birds in locked cages when I went out so that they wouldn’t eat up the woodwork (which they nevertheless did). I would come home, however, to find all the birds sitting on top of their cages and timmy would look at me triumphantly. I just know he was the only one who could pick just about any lock. I watched him fiddle with c-clamps for hours, it seemed his favorite pastime.
Timmy and Clyde Telling Secrets
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THE Retrieval
the bird below was a bird i rescued in mexico. he'd been pulling out his feathers. here, i brought him to a fountain where he went into a sweet reverie after years in an unlivable cage.
the bird below was a bird i rescued in mexico. he'd been pulling out his feathers. here, i brought him to a fountain where he went into a sweet reverie after years in an unlivable cage.
Just Before The Rain Came Just before the rain came,
a heaviness set into my bones;
a shadow crossed my face….
Just before the rain,
the dream-catcher froze in the window,
saying I must let these strangers in:
the nightmare of nakedness,
the one of forgetfulness,
the long abandonment,
as the tyranny of desolation, unheeded
turned
in myriads of dancing demands….
Just before dawn,
the rain came…
and with it, strange dreams.
But before I dreamed the strangers;
before the rain brought in the day;
a remarkably friendly, wild bird
came to me…
and you turned over, in your sleep,
pulled me to you, spooning
while the wild bird nestled
so unbelievably close!
before the strangeness,
and the rain
that brought a shadow to the day...
before I knew what I know now;
before the aching dreamed me up,
before I even saw your face,
before the koans of this life,
the fears and cravings,
this tunnel
of dreaming
of death into life....
Oh, before
all of this
world closed over
sensation
I was there,
as I am here
after all the chapters of these lives
blew away with dusts of yesterday,
there was, distinctly, the feelings:
moss on my cheek,
assuring kisses,
a loss of mind, consumed in energy
when all was balance….
Before I dozed
the first time,
before the breast was taken away,
before they brought in angst instead;
when I was just energy in motion,
music not colored by trauma,
but orchestrated
with rhythms
peculiar to no one--
I was with the wild bird who was not wild at all.
Between the "before"s and the "afterword"s,
between worlds, words and dreams
the slate was clean,
The mind was clear….
It was just before I was lonely.
Simkah, in a small tree outside Rao’s café, Amherst
The Naked Bird Birdie psych. 101
If you want to know what’s wrong with your pet, don’t look at the pet; look at the dynamics in your home. As a people therapist who has also worked with pets, I've found that when pet owners say, "We can't do a thing with him," they're revealing more about themselves than their pets.
In the movie The Horse Whisperer, the protagonist explains that his principle in working with animals is nuts and bolts: If the owner is nuts, the horse bolts. Poor relationships with pets often reflect poor relationships between humans. The culture in which we live causes us to lose touch with our nature and animals’ nature. We have lost our ability to respond to animals appropriately because we have lost our innate intelligence.
People have asked me over the years if the birds I have rehabilitated have feelings. It has been hard for me to bite my tongue and not ask, "Do you?” While the ethics of domesticating parrots is questionable, I have tried to educate humans and rescue those among these birds that are in distress.
~
Craig and Lynn were the distressed human parents of their adolescent African Gray parrot, Elvis.
"We don't know what to do. We've tried everything. We can't bear to put a restraining collar on him again – he gets so mad. Will you take him and see if you can get him to stop plucking himself?"
I told them that I'd work with him for a month and took him home. Half hoping they'd either get him a mate or release him to me, I provided him with a companion and immediately made a fuss over him, repeatedly telling him how beautiful he was to assuage his high anxiety. I've never met a bird who doesn't strut and cluck and get full of him- or herself when praised.
A month later, having become attached to Elvis and fearing for his future well being, I reluctantly returned the bird, who no longer plucked himself. I suggested that they get him a companion and give him lots of compliments. (Although it is a popular misconception that providing a companion makes a bird unfriendly, the truth is that it makes it less desperate.)
After I returned him, Elvis began plucking himself again. This time, Lynn seemed unconcerned, as if she had acclimated to his distress, as if this aberration was just the way he was.
Lynn had told me that Craig had hand-fed Elvis. Elvis, therefore, should have bonded with Craig from birth. Apparently, however, either they never did bond, or, more likely, Craig had that nasty way some fathers have of turning on their adolescents when they start to spread their wings.
Craig, like Elvis, was a neglected loner. He had become grumpy since a stroke had left him with a limp and low energy. A former social activist, he now hung around the house feeling useless. Perhaps it was too much of a reflection for him to see their obviously intelligent bird also sitting around the house doing nothing.
One day, Craig had a houseguest, Larry, who hid his hatred of their bird from them. Lynn left the house to teach her writing classes at a community college, and Craig went off to poke around in the barn. Larry slept in. That night, Lynn and Craig walked in the door of their farmhouse with arms full of fresh vegetables from the garden to discover that Elvis, badly plucked, had really done a job on himself. Lynn threw down the kale and cried, "Oh Elvis, what have you done?" Craig scowled at Elvis and sighed resignedly as he carried the kale over to the big enamel sink. Elvis threw his food and growled at Craig. He nipped Lynn for the first time in his life.
Every morning, Elvis normally awakened Lynn and Craig with a sweet, "Hello Momma, Hello Papa." But the morning following this event, they were awakened by their houseguest's voice: "Hello Momma. Fuck You Poppa." It was Elvis, perfectly imitating Larry. That evening, Elvis greeted them again in Larry's voice, this time saying, "You stupid ass! Fuck you." Lynn abruptly told Craig that Larry had to go. Craig agreed.
Every morning after that, it was the same greeting: “Hello Momma. Fuck you, Poppa.” Craig, who usually ignored Elvis, did not take this as a joke. Lynn explained to me that Craig had always been jealous of her relationship with the bird, and that he was bitter about the competition that had developed ever since Elvis had "dumped" him for her.
Months later, I attended a gathering at their house, and noticed that Elvis was plucked clean again. He hissed at the other guests. I began playing catch with him and Craig was astounded: "He plays?" I didn't know how to answer such a question, so I didn’t, maintaining my focus on Elvis and telling him how smart and pretty he was. Craig just watched us, shaking his head and remarking that he couldn’t get over it. Elvis and I were throwing a toy back and forth; the bird was perfectly attuned to my actions. Craig said he never knew he had it in him, and I wondered where his imagination was.
I knew that if I said anything to Craig about how he abused Elvis, it would only provoke more bad feelings from him toward the bird. I imagined that Craig had lost too much in life to lose face by acknowledging what he was doing to Elvis. But I also suspected that he, like Elvis, craved interaction, despite his loner stance. Perhaps his relationship with Elvis grew out of desperate and depressed attempts to interact, much like those of a child or adolescent who prefers to evoke negative responses from others over none at all.
"Here, you try." I held out the toy to Craig.
"No, I don't know how to play with a bird. I wish I did."
I looked away from Craig and into the clear, piercing eyes of that bird. He was suffering. What is it, dear alienated being of the sky, you virtual angel? The bird looked back, mournfully, and then I just knew: Elvis plucked himself because Craig belittled this great being. Craig abused Elvis as an outgrowth of his frustration over his situation. The bird was desperate.
"Lynn," I asked later, "does Craig make fun of Elvis?"
She rolled her eyes and exclaimed, "All the time! He calls him ‘Stupid’ and ‘Hey, Ugly,’ and ‘Pest,’ and he goes around the house saying, ‘Damn noisy animal, who does he think he is?’"
We agreed that these constant attacks were making Elvis miserable. Craig was not aware that Elvis felt those taunts and was hurt by them. But Lynn noted that now that she thought about it, it had always been after a taunt that Elvis had plucked himself.
"There is a cold spot in Craig," she confided. "You can actually feel it on his chest. I can't seem to warm it. I just can't get him to stop. It's like a game, a joke. The bird's feelings are just not real to him. I think he truly saves all up his frustration for Elvis. The more I tell him to stop, the more he makes fun of him, and then he derides me if I persist."
"Well, I can find him a breeding situation." (I heard my words and mused to myself that I could be referring to her husband and not the bird.)
"What can I do?” cries Lynn. “I just can't bear to part with him. He's my baby. Maybe someday I will be able to let him go, but not yet. He's the only real comfort I've got." (And I briefly wondered which of the two males she was referring to.)
I told her that in the wild, no birds ever pull out their own feathers, that this is an aberration.
Elvis jumped down onto her shoulder and put his head, the only part of his body that wasn't plucked, on her shoulder. Theirs seemed to be the primary relationship in this household. No wonder Craig was so obnoxious toward this sensitive, intelligent bird.
I believed that this situation could heal Craig if it could lead him to heal his attitude toward the strange bird that he, himself, had become since his stroke, the strange bird who couldn't walk straight, let alone fly.
"But poor Elvis," I said.
Lynn answered, “I know, I know. I can't pretend to believe that he's just an animal. I know Elvis suffers. But so do I."
I wondered if Lynn and Elvis would cement their bond and exclude Craig. I wondered if Craig would learn to play – but responsible like Craig often get the playfulness ground out of them, and women like Lynn often don’t have enough time to straighten out the tangled web of their loyalties and needs.
Cody’s Apology Cody had bit me and I’d yelled at him and put him firmly down on the stand in the kitchen. He bent his head and walked toward me with his wings hanging very low by his sides and his beak scraping the floor. When he got to my feet he stopped and looked up at me intently. I yelled at him again and put him back on his perch. He climbed down and repeated the exact movements he had just performed, wings low to the ground, head down, beak scraping along the floor until he got to my feet and again looked up at me earnestly. I felt him being sorry and wanting to be picked up and told it was OK. Which I did and he gave me a kiss.
Cody and Misha watch Simkah, bathing.
Simkah, bathing
Golden Conure [pastels]
Yellow Bird I dreamt of you again last night, my lemony Indian Ringneck.
From reservoirs of other selves you rose, summoning up forgotten presences and traditions:
more fitting ways of being on this Earth.
Happy as ever to join worlds, you came forth from isolation,
waddling with your ankles almost collapsed from baby malnutrition.
[Other nights I fall asleep wondering how I can support myself, and dream that my knees are collapsing.]
You, like I, were pulled from the mother, while yet in embryonic consciousness;
ripped out of a frame that held together puzzles of unlived lives.
I'm reminded of an impressionist painting of a deceased artist: to make it fit upon a wall, the curators hacked off the bottom--
characters in the painting seemed to be falling off of the bottom edge.
There is no longer an entry point.
People complain of brusqueness--an unfeminine trait we both share.
Skewed and falsified in attempts to accommodate walls not our own, we too seem to topple out of pictures and places.
You, having forgotten your native song, imitate humans, whining dogs, while I forgot my lineage, say un-cool things in public.
Our bodies weakened and wobbly, we're trying in vain to fit someone else's arbitrary concepts.
You fly into the screen door, plop to the kitchen floor.
It is not our fault we don't know how to make it out there, honey.
Mitch and I note that you seem half-cocked, waddling along slowly, sweeping the floor willy-nilly with your long tail. We laugh and call you waltzing Matilda.
[At work, me, hung over from sugar and caffeine. A co-worker eyes me with slight suspicion, mostly curiosity and affection: she cocks her head, and asks if I'm high.]
It is said that you Ringnecks don't bond. Is it because you take on different mates unlike the others who pair for life?
Can you truly not bond or do you simply reject bondage?
{Would they say that a Nun or a Yogi can't bond?}
Full of contradictions, the one we call "Blond Bimbo", you are the one Mitch and I take turns bringing to bed when our spirits get laden and earthbound. We choose you from the rest of the flock. It is always you of whom I dream, my buttercup, so bright, so untenable, yet as tender as any I've had or tamed.
Yet you've had me. In daylight I've made light out of you, affectionately called you a slut because you would lay yourself out in the palm of a hand of anyone who would turn you on your back to rub your breast, sticking one talon into your beak as if biting a nail, awaiting a compliment or a scratch under the wing.
Like a man, I claimed that I didn't need you at all, could sell or trade you tomorrow because I was not attached to you in the same way I was to the others. But the other Ringnecks, both males, flew away.
Pasha, with the necklace of black, aqua and fuchsia, wriggled right out of Mitch's hands and flew away for a fatal vacation.
After Pasha left I was rolling up intricate patterns of colored clays to make a millefiori necklace. I kept crying and working feverishly to distract myself, cutting the clay open to view the new symmetrical designs . Four times there emerged from the colors an icon of a parrot in flight. Some archetypal being or was it my parrot self was reassuring me, he returns to his true nature, no need to cry.
I remember how you chased away the aloof and exquisite Cleo in preference for you brother by whom you knelt, craning your neck, begging to be fed by him, acting like a baby. Cleo was never aloof towards you. You appeared in my animistic projection as cruel, menacingly poking at Cleo, fickle and incestuous by human terms.
Then, fickle girl, when Pasha wasn't looking, you would sidle up to Cleo and rest your downy head in his breast as if to say, "of course I still love you...".
Now you have lost or abandoned three mates to the wind and the illusion of summers. Lost to the irresistible green heights, which apparently imbue you all with new flight feathers. How is it that you Asians who could reach no heights indoors but only hop or flutter to the floor, suddenly flew, when we held you outdoors? Was it the songs yet unsung in your pulsing breasts that imbued you with such lightness as to lift you out of our tight love? I claimed I could let you go to a breeder, called you ridiculous because you choose to mimic only discordant sounds and not the Enie Kleine Nacht whistles or the cordial hello's and wolf whistles of your rival, our blue crowned Amazon, Simpkah.
No, you only imitate the tones that itch and annoy, that interrupt Sunday morning slumbers: a whining pup, Nemo, a black crowned soul bird who was stolen from his flock and his beloved rain forests--his shrill territorial warnings to all that alighted on his yard, announcing his dominion, to real and mostly imagined intruders. It would be funny that you do these things, but you abandoned your own undulating song when your brother abandoned you.
I have considered sending you elsewhere but the one time I sent you to a friend's home you were sent back with a bad report: she called you a "bad bird", "A biter," and I had to rethink my feelings for her.
You were merely frightened to death. Why couldn't she, who'd been so nurturing to humans see that? Why did she leave you alone with the cat whom you glowered at from behind the bookcase where you crouched? I retrieved you as I'd done in the pet shop when the whites of your eyes had turned red from stress, looking haggard although still a baby. You looked at Mitch when we returned home and spoke with your eyes such relief.
We know what you mean, can hear your feelings, simply from living with you. You are the one the only one who sleeps all night cuddled in the crook of my neck when I am not willing to contain my hurting, can receive no more comfort from humans. Humans are unable to absorb each others' pain. You are the one who gets in, who loves me tenaciously and yet with exquisite subtlety. You slip right though the veil into my dreams as softly lapping broken waves upon the shore of my consciousness, washing over and healing me, surrounding me with your golden innocence, saying to me that it's OK to be imperfect, be vulnerable. I remember that life embraces suffering, that it's inevitable and can't be avoided. You make slight flap flapping sounds with your wings, contentment in the privileged dark.
And then the day folds a curtain down over that reality. My mind recoils from the images alive with sensation and we are each alone again.
I can barely recall the dream now, only that you were in a cage with bigger birds who could have hurt you but who chose not to. Perhaps like me, in Man's World. Perhaps we are no longer endangered, but simply require more open space and attention. In the dream I keep trying to bring you home, but I'm hampered by reservations and doubts about how to care for you properly. In the dream you were in the care of an abused heavy set woman, a judgmental self, burdened by your neediness, your demand to be as you only know how to be, and not be destroyed. I offer to relieve her of the burden of you, to take you home, to extract you from her oppressive demands: to walk straight, eat right, forget the lightness of your phantom flight feathers.
The dream is interrupted by your calling me forth to continue accommodating frames that don't fit.
Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (ink-wash)
Sulphur Crested Cockatoo #2
