For parrot rescuers and their helpers, there is no such thing as a slow day. There are always baby parrots to be hand-fed, wings to be clipped, or another bird in need of a new home.
Just ask Brian Wilson of the Wilson Parrot Foundation of Damascus, or Ruth Hanessian, president of the Animal Exchange, an avian-centric pet shop in Rockville. They, along with Phoenix Landing of Arlington, are some of the very few bird rescuers in the region who specialize in saving and rehabilitating the big, smart, engaging and colorful creatures we call parrots.
It’s no small job. These birds of the order Psittaciformes — including not just parrots but macaws, conures, parakeets, budgerigars, lovebirds, parrotlets, cockatoos and cockatiels, most of them native to Central and South America (with some types hailing from Asia, Africa and Australia) — are among the most intelligent, conversational and social of birds.
At least that’s what they’ll tell you.
“They will demand and take as much attention as you can give them,” Ms. Hanessian says.
A lifetime commitment
Why the need for such good Samaritans? These exotic birds fetch $7,000 to $12,000 within the pet trade, and their owners don’t simply abandon them or casually hand them over to the pound.
But parrots and their kin are high-maintenance pets that require a lifelong commitment: Some of the larger birds can live to 100 years in captivity, and their smaller cousins to at least 20. Any potential big-bird owners should think twice about casually taking on a member of the parrot or cockatoo families as a pet, the specialists say.
And it’s when the unwary owners have fallen down on the job — by tiring of the care the demanding birds need or by getting fed up with annoying antics that the humans themselves have encouraged, or by dying — that the rescuers come into the picture.
Mr. Wilson gained a word-of-mouth reputation as a man who understood parrots in his days as a firefighter with the Laytonsville Fire Department, when he would use his own pet parrots as actors and visual aids in fire- and gun-safety talks to children at daycare centers.
Now he’s the go-to person for parrot care, and has acquired his flock of parrots, macaws and cockatoos from a range of owners who couldn’t cope.
One parrot, a Congo African Grey whose owners complained it would not let them touch it, came to him completely plucked and with a deformed beak. Another, a biter and screamer that had been returned to the pet store where it was originally purchased, was passed on to Mr. Wilson by the store’s owner.
Others arrive for a variety of reasons: allergies, household moves, changing family circumstances of any kind.
For Ms. Hanessian, who earned a degree in ornithology from Cornell University, the experience is similar: The parakeets, lovebirds, parrotlets and cockatiels she currently looks after were brought into her shop by families who could no longer manage them.
Both have developed techniques of dealing with misbehaving birds that, in some cases, approximate the way they might handle an unruly child.
“The worst thing you can do is overreact when a parrot bites you, because then he will think he’s gotten your attention and will repeat the behavior,” Mr. Wilson says, showing off two arms crisscrossed with nicks and scars left over from training sessions.
“When the parrot realizes he’s not getting an excited reaction from you when he bites, then he soon becomes bored and stops the behavior,” he says.
Back to life
For Mr. Wilson, the birds have been a lifesaver.
He started his foundation, which rehabilitates and finds new homes for the big birds in the parrot family, while recovering from a car accident in October 1995 in Silver Spring that paralyzed his right side, wrecked some of his cognitive functions and left him with a lingering loss of muscle function — enough so that he had to retire early from his firefighting job.
Worse, the accident happened as he was returning with his birds from one of his safety talks: every bird in the car died save one.
But he had that one, Daisy, a blue and gold macaw who is still with him, and he had the others that frustrated owners kept giving him, and he used his work with them to bring himself back.
Now he’s made their rehabilitation his life’s calling.
“The birds helped me to talk and walk again,” he says simply. “Now I’m giving back to them.”
Mr. Wilson has trained most of his birds to talk, to “sing opera” or to clamber onto strangers’ outstretched arms and hands, then quietly pose for photographs perched on peoples’ shoulders or chests. He takes them to nursing homes or to outdoor festivals, where he entertains people in exchange for a take-home photo they can buy, or for a donation to his rescue and rehabilitation foundation.
To make sure his parrots and macaws find good homes, he usually tells anyone who is interested in adopting one of his birds to volunteer at the foundation for several hours a week for three to six months, until they get to know the specific birds and how to handle them properly.
This way, Mr. Wilson says, “the bird picks its new owner” as often as the volunteer chooses the bird.
He will not allow anyone younger than 29 to adopt any of his birds.
“Until that age, a person is not settled enough in their life or mature enough to take on the commitment” of parrot care, he says.
One of Mr. Wilson’s helpers, Betty Brown, a 53-year-old Mount Airy resident, has volunteered at the foundation since February. She is particularly interested in a cockatoo named Shilo, who responds excitedly to her by bouncing up and down and raising his white and yellow crest.
Anna Rositzky, a 60-year-old resident of Damascus who helps Mr. Wilson at the foundation, owns several sulfur-crested cockatoos, varying in age from 6 to 15.
“They sleep with me; they eat popcorn with me while we watch my favorite television show; and I’m training them to dance,” she says.
One of Ms. Rositsky’s cockatoos, “Cuddles,” even likes to accompany her to local drive-through restaurants, where the bird loudly requests “french fries.”
A request for such a special treat should not be denied, Mr. Wilson says.
“As long as you give the birds quality care and everything they love and desire, they’ll give you back tenfold,” in love and companionship, he says.
The trade
Time was when these birds were captured in the wild and imported. That has changed since passage of the Wild Bird Conservation Act of 1992, a measure designed to stem a trade that was obliterating exotic birds.
Even now some species are threatened, endangered or reproducing in very low numbers. For example, fewer than 3,000 Hyacinth Macaws, a Brazilian bird of dazzling blue, survive.
According to Ms. Hanessian, who both buys and sells such birds in addition to the ones she’s been given, the import route to parrot ownership has almost completely shut down.
Importing the birds “requires a lot of documentation,” she says, a 30-day quarantine period, and in some cases bribery of local officials in the birds’ country of origin.
Today, she says, these birds “are almost exclusively bred in captivity.”
Even so, the birds’ value is such that if those found escaped or wandering — usually because their owners failed to clip their wings — are not picked up by humans who have their best interests in mind, they will probably be sold.
They may be shuttled around from dealer to dealer, middlemen who do not really care about finding the bird a good home, but who are only interested in making quick money. With some of the birds — such as the Hyacinth Macaw — bringing top dollar in pet stores, it is easy to see why.
“I understand that in the past, if the Humane Society in Montgomery County advertised that they had found a parrot, by the next day they had received 65 phone calls from people, each claiming that they’ve lost it,” Ms. Hanessian says.
Homes for the homeless
In her shop, Ms. Hanessian deals almost exclusively with birds bred in captivity from a domesticated pair, and tries to make sure they get a permanent home.
“A majority of the birds we sell will be kept for the life of the bird, and sometimes they are even handed down from one generation of the family to another,” she says.
Four times a day, until they can be weaned and readied for a permanent home, she hand-feeds baby birds sent to her by breeders. She uses a miniature bottle she adapted from a water bottle for small mammals. The effort pays off because the young birds become accustomed to human handling, which makes them better pets.
And she relies on an unusual “Lend-a-Pet” program she started in 1982 at the Rockville Senior Center. It helps find homes for the birds people have brought to her, and at the same time provides companions for lonely seniors who no longer live with their families.
Under the program, Ms. Hanessian brings cages of her birds each month to the Rockville Senior Center, where the residents can interact with them. If one of the elderly members of the center wants to temporarily adopt a bird, the pet shop owner will provide the bird, a cage and some bird food free to the senior to assist with its care.
Ms. Hanessian is also a bit of a bird shrink, and co-author of the 1998 primer “Birds on the Couch: The Bird Shrink’s Guide to Keeping Polly from Going Crackers and You Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
She will either counsel owners on what to change about their own behavior while interacting with the bird, teach them better handling techniques in a parrot psychology class or, if all else fails, help them find a better home for the bird.
Ms. Hanessian does this by using her extensive list of bird lovers, breeders and other contacts to help owners who must give up their big birds to find another family where the parrot, macaw or cockatoo will be happy.
“As a Gold Circle Dealer in the Maryland Association of Pet Industries, I’m committed to rehoming animals that can’t be kept,” Ms. Hanessian says.
The experts’ advice
Much of the need for rehabilitation originates with owners baffled by parrot behavior.
Humans who do not understand parrots may mishandle them, encouraging negative habits such as biting or screaming — which results in exasperation with a seemingly out-of-control bird. The human’s response? Keep it caged continually or give it away.
Other parrot owners fail to keep their birds’ wings clipped. The result? The bird flies off when startled and either injures itself by knocking into a window, or manages to escape from a house, where it may become prey to hawks or eagles.
The experts’ advice:
Wear leather gloves when training parrots, or at least don’t react when a parrot bites, Mr. Wilson says. And trim parrots’ primary flight feathers about once every six to eight weeks.
Handle the birds frequently and talk to them, Ms. Hanessian says. And expect the occasional bite or nip: “Parrots explore and test the world with their strong beaks,” she says.
The two agree on the subject of cages, but with a different emphasis.
Ms. Hanessian says it is acceptable for the bird to spend some time in its cage. “While most pet birds are family members who interact with the family and are often out of the cage when people are around, a cage is still a safe place for the birds,” she says.
Mr. Wilson believes that keeping large parrots, cockatoos and macaws in cages all day is a big mistake, and that these birds should be brought out of their cages daily and placed on perches so that they can interact with a responsible adult. Neglecting such close attention will cause the bird to scream and act out, or pull out all the feathers around its own neck in boredom and frustration, he says.
In any case, both suggest treating the birds as members of the family.
Ms. Hanessian tells the story of a man who kept his pet parrot, with unclipped wings, on his shoulder outdoors while the man tended a barbecue grill. When the grill flamed up, the parrot became alarmed and flew into some trees in a park. The man had to follow the bird for several days, and finally lured it out of the trees by offering it a dip in its favorite miniature bathtub.
In another case, a bird that had gotten separated from its family flew into a woman’s back yard, knocked with its beak on her patio glass door, and then calmly walked into the stranger’s house when she opened the door, as if it had always lived there.
That’s a parrot for you.
Parrot postcript
Parrot rehabilitators are a breed apart, willing to spend long hours nursing and understanding the brilliant but demanding birds of the parrot and cockatoo families. All local humane society and animal shelters accept parrots and try to find homes for them, but first check these parrot specialists:
• Animal Exchange: 605 Hungerford Drive, Rockville. Shop owner Ruth Hanessian’s book on parrot psychology, “Birds on the Couch: The Bird Shrink’s Guide to Keeping Polly from Going Crackers and You Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest,” was published in 1998 by Crown and is available through Amazon and other booksellers. 301/424-7387 or 424pets.com.
• Phoenix Landing: P.O. Box 7661, Arlington. A non-profit all-volunteer organization here and in North Carolina that provides temporary and permanent homes for unwanted parrots and sponsors a wide range of educational talks and activities. 866/749-5634 or phoenixlanding.org.
• Talk: “A Parrot’s Point of View”: Grace Presbyterian Church, 7434 Bath St., Springfield, Va. 10 a.m.-noon Aug. 11.
• Talk: Scott Echols, DVM, on outlets for a parrot’s mental and physical energy: Fairlington Presbyterian Church, 3846 King St., Alexandria. 10 a.m.-noon Sept. 8.
• “Things I Wish I’d Known”: A comprehensive parrot care program. Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, 1415 West Seventh St., Frederick, Md., 10 a.m.-noon Sept. 22; Highlands Animal Clinic, 25011 Lee Highway, Abingdon, Va., 1-3 p.m. Sept. 30.
• The Wilson Parrot Foundation: 26613 Ridge Road, Damascus. Brian Wilson works with volunteers to train and find homes for the birds; contributions are tax-deductible. 301/368-3200 or wilsonparrotfoundation.com.
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