Saturday, 9:00 AM

An hour ago, I stepped off a plane that brought me to Atlanta from my new home in New Bern, North Carolina. I’m here for several reasons of varying importance, but my present surroundings say something of my priorities. I’ve been picked up at the airport by Allison and driven directly to the Parrots of the Caribbean aviary at the Georgia Renaissance Festival.

Allison, someone who’d never really handled parrots or cockatoos before meeting me, ran the aviary without me this year. For the two previous years, eight weeks of my life have been devoted to this place and its residents, a ragtag group of hook-billed characters who have come to be my friends. They surround me now, all wanting attention, all with a lot to say in both parrot and human languages. They’re thrilled to see me, and I to see them. The one thing these wonderful, intelligent creatures can’t understand is the reason for my visit. They don’t know I’ve come to say goodbye.

I have no idea how to do that, really. It will mean nothing to the birds; to them, I will simply never be seen again. Parrots are very social, forming flocks, and it is the reality of nature that members of the flock will occasionally disappear. They’ll note that I never came back, but they won’t miss me in the way humans miss each other.

In a way, that makes my visit somewhat selfish. It is I who will miss them, but there’s more than that. Even though they will not comprehend or appreciate it, I owe these birds my thanks. I am more than I was before I met them. They have all taught me something, and they have all shared something with me.

My friend Monkey is a huge, boisterous moluccan cockatoo. The “Crocodile Hunter,” Steve Irwin, once said that the only animal he feared was the cockatoo, probably because as a child he nearly lost his nose to one. The cockatoo’s beak can easily apply 300 pounds per square inch of force, and unlike the beak of a parrot, it’s kept razor sharp.

Working with birds, one learns to watch the iris of the eye. Hookbills pinpoint their pupils just before biting. Cruelly, nature has given the male cockatoo irises which are almost black and therefore invisible, depriving us of this advance warning. Working with Monkey was, as you can imagine, quite intimidating, and I was initially quite nervous. He sensed this, and rather than taking advantage as some birds might, he made a game of it. He would reach for my hand, and I would pull back, then try again. Eventually, steeling myself for a nasty bite, I put out my hand and didn’t pull away. That huge, black, fearsome beak touched my hand, gripped my knuckle very gently, and held on as one black, scaly foot reached out and stepped onto my hand. Lesson one.

We worked together often after that. I became very confident. Monkey and I would show off for the visitors; he loved to clown, and would dance and chatter and sing, flipping his crest around and flapping his giant, colorful wings. He got very excited one day, a condition that bird handlers call overstimulation, and began jumping up and down wildly on my hand. Before I could calm him, he’d reached down and neatly removed a small chunk of flesh from the ball of my thumb. Lesson two.

Monkey taught me that not everyone who has the ability to hurt me is destined to hurt me. He also taught me that even those who don’t want to hurt me will, now and then. He also gave me hours of companionship, and kept me smiling and laughing on days when life was nothing to laugh about. Today, I hold him on my arm and groom his crest feathers, scratch his head, and whisper my thanks to my friend and teacher.

Mom and Dad, the blue and gold macaws, have had a baby since I last wrote about these birds. Little Costa is not yet a year old, and he’s already flying skillfully around the aviary. The first week of the festival, seven weeks ago, he was so frightened of human contact that getting him out of his cage was a nearly-futile struggle. This morning, I had the honor of bringing him out from his cage, and he stepped onto my hand with almost no coaxing. This is the result of weeks of work by Chelsea, Allison’s daughter. A young woman who was once terribly afraid of birds is now a sufficiently accomplished trainer that she has taken a completely untrained young bird and hand-tamed him with no help from me other than advice over the phone. Mom and Dad are very proud of Costa, and I am very proud of Chelsea, who has really stepped up to learn everything she could about bird handling.

I really respect Dad. He and Mom are a strongly mated breeding pair, and they typically reject most human contact. They’ll take a treat from me, and say hello, and sometimes even step onto my arm without inflicting injury, but I’m mostly tolerated. Dad’s a tough guy. If I get too close, he’ll lunge at me, but won’t usually bite. At all times when I’m near him, he fixes me with a steely gaze. If I stay in his territory too long, he will raise his wings high, covering his family like a tent, and lower his head, doing his best to look large, fierce, and dangerous. He could fly at my face any time he wished, doing me grave damage, and would if he thought I was a serious threat. This isn’t aggression. It’s communication. Sometimes I raise my “wings” too, meeting his gaze, and we stare that way, unflinching. Sometimes he folds his first, and sometimes I mine, but we reach an understanding. I won’t hurt him, and he won’t hurt me, as long as I don’t do anything stupid. I fully believe that big bird would die defending his mate and his offspring.

Courage alone is inspiring. Courage that is expressed not through fighting or violence but merely by non-verbal, universal means is even more moving. Dad’s proud, yes, and brave, but he’s also wise, and has shown me the nature of true strength.

Lola, a blue-fronted amazon parrot, once sidled up next to Buddy, a moluccan cockatoo easily four times her size. She just wanted to share a perch, but Buddy was not keen. Buddy began to scream — loudly, shrilly, he made his displeasure known. Lola ignored him. He bent down, continuing to scream but now directing his ire into Lola’s ear. Lola preened, not even looking up. Buddy nipped at her, and she looked up for a moment, then returned to preening. Buddy’s screaming reached a crescendo, and Lola yawned, then sidled a bit closer, cuddling directly up to Buddy’s side. Eventually, he resorted to violence and made a biting motion, and Lola, having made her point, took one step to the side and ended the encounter.

The world is full of territorial loudmouths. Lola taught me that they can easily be ignored as long as a bit of shrillness doesn’t bother you, and sometimes walking away and letting them bluster to themselves is the most satisfying response.

Sarge is a weird fellow. He’s a military macaw, olive drab all over with a red forehead. He can be very friendly, and he can be a vampire; it all depends on his mood. One day, while I was working with him and offering him a treat, he reached out and bit my finger instead. It was a fairly hard bite, and as he clamped down, I felt a slight snap. At first I thought he’d chipped my bone, but I immediately noticed blood on his beak and my skin wasn’t broken. In his moment of pique, he’d bitten my finger so hard that he’d cracked the tip of his beak.

A cracked beak is a serious matter. Blood doesn’t clot well in the beak; it’s not chitinous like an animal’s horn or a squid’s beak, but is instead an actual bone covered with vascularized, growing keratin. Sarge seemed to know he was in trouble, and his whole demeanor changed as his day went from annoying to frightening. Somehow he knew I was trying to help. The treatment involved toweling him so that he wouldn’t squirm or injure anyone and then grinding down the keratin beyond the crack, then stopping the bleeding with styptic and pressure. When we released him, putting him into his cage so he’d rest quietly, his first thought was food. Unlike many traumatized birds, Sarge didn’t hold a grudge, and we remained friends. He nipped at me a few times today, being his usual grumpy self, and it was good to see him looking healthy and in fine feather. I thanked him for trusting.

How can I describe Fred? Fred and Lilac, both Amazon parrots, were inseparable. They never produced or brooded eggs, but they were a couple. They were also both absolutely impossible to handle. Neither would leave the cage, even on a stick, and they’d bite any appendage, human or avian, that approached within reach. I agreed to take them home and work with them for a few weeks. As they sat in their cage waiting to be loaded into the van, a curious blue-fronted Amazon named Lola landed on their cage for a visit. Fred latched onto one of her toes and nearly severed it before anyone could intervene. Lola recovered but eventually lost the claw and tip of that toe. There was clearly work to be done here.

Lilac, as it turned out, was too wild to be tamed. She was a wild-caught bird, not bred in captivity like most pet birds, and she instinctively feared human contact. No amount of work on my part of Steve’s could get her to accept handling. Fred wasn’t such a hard case.

I spent several evenings sitting in front of the cage, talking to Fred. For the first week I made no attempt to handle him at all; we just looked at each other, and I talked. After a while, I could see Fred listening to me, and he would begin making some responsive sounds. Progress was slow.

After two weeks I made my first attempt to teach Fred to step up onto my hand. This was a time when I bled a lot. Fred had a sharp, powerful beak, and was devastatingly quick. He went from pinpointing to excising tissue in milliseconds. I endured the bites, didn’t get demonstrably upset with him, and continued trying. Slowly, the bites got softer, but he still couldn’t manage the idea of my hand inside his cage. Lilac made the situation harder, nipping him on the shoulder to get him to move away from me because she feared for her mate.

One day, I extended a round perch into the cage and said, “Step up!” as I’d done hundreds of times before. Fred lifted a foot, set it down, lifted it again, and tentatively put it onto the offered perch. After a few tense seconds, the other foot followed. I brought him out, placed my hand in front of the stick perch, and said, “Step up!” again. Onto my hand he stepped … nervously, cautiously. He spread his tail feathers wide in the usual Amazon expression of cautious apprehension, pinpointed at me, and in a low, rumbling voice said, “Fred’s a good bird.”

Three weeks elapsed between Fred’s savage attack on Lola and his first cautious attempt at cooperating with me. We worked together for another month. I was sad when I returned the couple to Steve’s care last year, but Fred is now a well-adjusted bird who flies free in the aviary and gets along famously with the other birds. He’s in perfect feather and is gorgeous when he flies. He hadn’t seen me for months this morning, but when I put out my hand, he stepped right up before I could even ask. His new friend, another Amazon named Rocky, stepped onto my other hand and the three of us had an extensive conversation on the subject of who was, indeed, a good bird, and how we all were, and who was a pretty boy. I will always remember the three of us laughing in unison.

Fred, sadly, lost his mate, Lilac, to a predator (a raccoon, we think) that invaded the aviary at New York’s Renaissance Faire. Even in the face of this, he’s doing wonderfully. Fred affirmed for me something I’ve really always known. There are no bad birds. They’re all basically good, but even more so than people are the product of their environment and the traumas and happy times of their past. I will always love Fred, and saying goodbye to him was like losing a part of me.

These birds and many others have all been my teachers. I will never see the world through the remarkable eyes of a bird, but I am engaged in a lifelong effort to understand the way they see life, the world, and me. Every bird I have ever met has left me with a gift, small or large, of bird wisdom. I love spending time with them, interacting with them, and learning to understand their unique perspective. I will miss these birds, and it is with many tears and a heavy heart that I walk away from them for probably the last time.

Sunday, 5:00 PM

I’m driving a full-sized Ford van filled with all but one of my own flock of birds, bringing them from our old home near Atlanta to our new house in North Carolina. Behind me, Baby Bird, our little green-cheeked conure, is fussing at Radar, a Nanday, for being a little too close. Baby Bird thrusts out her neck and says her name as if to say, “This is BABY BIRD’s place!” Radar, undaunted, fires back “BABY BIRD! BABY BIRD!”

Two timneh African grey parrots, meanwhile, are chatting to each other. “Hello, grey bird.” “Hi.” “Can I have a kiss?” (fart sound) “Nooooo…”

Jojo, the quiet, somewhat shy Eclectus, listens intently, saying “Uh-huh” at all the appropriate moments.

In a few short hours, my flock, along with Penny the dog, Tigger the cat, and assorted other items that were packed in for the trip, will be at their new home. It’s a long, stressful trip for an avian, canine, or feline traveler, but they all seem in good spirits.

Monday, Noon

Baby Bird is asleep inside the little tent Allison made for her which hangs inside her cage. Jojo and Radar chatter quietly to each other while the greys nap in their alcove. Penny is dozing at my feet, Tigger is on the back of my chair purring quietly, and I’m vegetating in front of the TV. Everyone’s been fed, watered, and attended to. Allison is still not here, and won’t be for a couple of days, but I feel more like I’m home now than I have since moving to North Carolina. For a while, I am at peace, and I slowly drift into a deep, restful sleep in my recliner, feeling the warmth of my feathered and furry friends around me.