Craige: No matter how beautiful, I'm only a one-bird woman
21.05.12
Yesterday, when I accidentally startled her, Cosmo flew to the floor. That is, she glided very fast to the floor, since her flight feathers have been clipped. I picked up my dear African Grey Parrot and held her against my chest. Her heart was beating very fast.
After a minute, Cosmo looked up at me and said, in the softest, sweetest, sincerest voice I’d ever heard, “I love you.”
Cosmo is not a perfect bird. She bites. And she poops on the floor. (See “Areas Requiring Improvement” in her Feb. 5 annual evaluation.)
But Cosmo knows that I love her, that I will always give her attention, that I will always feed her, and that I will never strike her, even when she bites.
Not all parrots are so fortunate.
A couple of months ago I was invited to a dinner party by parrot rescuer Deb Allwein and her husband Bob. Deb and Bob founded the No-”R”-Birds Parrot Sanctuary to provide a home to parrots not as fortunate as Cosmo.
Their lovely house looks perfectly normal on the main floor, inhabited by perfectly normal humans. But the basement: Wow! It’s like none I’ve ever seen. It is large, spotlessly clean, painted lime green, and inhabited by twenty-six colorful, highly intelligent and very vocal birds who reside in big cages full of toys. It has a kitchen dedicated to their feeding and an attached aviary for them to be outside in warm weather. It soon will have a huge flight cage.
Source: Online Athens